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The Week in Germany: Culture July 13, 2007 Reverse Heyerdahl: Ancient-style Reed Boat Tackles Atlantic
A German biologist is undertaking an epic journey to prove that that transatlantic trade is much older than we think. Dominique Görlitz, 41, and a crew of eight set sail Wednesday from New York in a prehistoric-style reed boat to show that people 6,000 to 14,000 years ago could have have travelled both ways across the Atlantic - with the tradewinds to the West and tacking into them on the return journey. "I believe that trade between American and Mediterranean civilisations began 14,000 years ago," Görlitz wrote in the Financial Times. "If I make it, the world needs to reconsider the true beginning of the global economy." Görlitz cites the still unexplained appearance of North American plants in Asia and Africa to support his theory. Fifteen years ago, the German scientist Svetlana Balabanova found traces of cocaine and nicotine in the mummy of Ramses II. What clinched Görlitz's conviction was a lowly plant called the bottle gourd. For more than a decade, he has bugged his professors about how the bottle gourd, which was essential for the development of irrigation and agriculture across a world that had not yet discovered pottery, managed to become established as a full-blown domesticated plant within a relatively short time in Asia, the Americas and Africa. The standard answer was that the seed was first domesticated in one place, and then floated to the other places. "I asked my botany professor, and he shrugged his shoulders," Görlitz said. "'We assume it got there under its own power,' I was told. 'Ask the archeologists'." The archeologists didn't know either, and they sent Görlitz to the ethnologists, who also didn't know. Görlitz was convinced that the answer lay in a long-distance ocean voyages, like the one he is undertaking. Görlitz's boat - called the Abora III - is constructed along the lines of the late Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl's Ra, out of 17 tons of reed papyrus that grows at the 3,800-metre-high Lake Titicaca on the border of Peru and Bolivia. Unlike the Ra, however, the Abora has 16 leeboards - or retractable foils - for steering, a refinement that will enable Abora to tack into the wind and carry it eastwards. The first stop on the Abora's projected three-and-a-half-month journey is the Azore islands, where Görlitz hopes to put in for fresh provisions by August 10, and then to Cadiz on Spain's southern tip and the Canary Islands. The boat will be equipped with modern navigation and communications equipment. The Abora's website, www.abora3.de, will be posting live reports on the journey, estimated to cost more than 500,000 dollars. (TWIG, dpa) Links:
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