Weaver wrote:

jamest wrote:Yeah but we're talking about 5,000 years ago. I'm no expert but suspect they had nothing like that back then. Plus the Pacific is open water, whereas the route between Britain & Syria would have required more precise navigation (several turns etc.)... to be done on a regular basis.

Do you really think it's easier to navigate over open water to small landing sites (islands in an ocean) than it is to navigate within range of shore sightings to confirm position and other needed references?

And the Polynesians completed their expansion/migration about 3,000 years ago - but didn't have the advantages of the Bronze Age technological advancements or the multiple cultures with which to engage in trade in knowledge and materials. They did it all with Stone Age technology.

Weaver wrote:You seem to think that the trade was direct - from Britain to Syria, with no stops in between - and that it was isolated to single-cargo trades.

You are totally wrong on both counts.

Syrian material ending up in Britain doesn't mean it went there directly via a single boat journey (although, again, it would be MUCH easier in the Med, with multiple port stops and the ability to resupply, than it would be on the open ocean) - it is far more likely that material from Syria gradually spread across the Med as trade technology improved, eventually resulting in short-distance trades between the British Isles and coastal France.

jamest wrote:

Weaver wrote:You seem to think that the trade was direct - from Britain to Syria, with no stops in between - and that it was isolated to single-cargo trades.

You are totally wrong on both counts.

Syrian material ending up in Britain doesn't mean it went there directly via a single boat journey (although, again, it would be MUCH easier in the Med, with multiple port stops and the ability to resupply, than it would be on the open ocean) - it is far more likely that material from Syria gradually spread across the Med as trade technology improved, eventually resulting in short-distance trades between the British Isles and coastal France.

Don't forget, we're talking 5,000 years ago. Do you think that trade was that complex, even then?

jamest wrote:

Weaver wrote:You seem to think that the trade was direct - from Britain to Syria, with no stops in between - and that it was isolated to single-cargo trades.

You are totally wrong on both counts.

Syrian material ending up in Britain doesn't mean it went there directly via a single boat journey (although, again, it would be MUCH easier in the Med, with multiple port stops and the ability to resupply, than it would be on the open ocean) - it is far more likely that material from Syria gradually spread across the Med as trade technology improved, eventually resulting in short-distance trades between the British Isles and coastal France.

Don't forget, we're talking 5,000 years ago. Do you think that trade was that complex, even then?

Weaver wrote:

jamest wrote:

Weaver wrote:You seem to think that the trade was direct - from Britain to Syria, with no stops in between - and that it was isolated to single-cargo trades.

You are totally wrong on both counts.

Syrian material ending up in Britain doesn't mean it went there directly via a single boat journey (although, again, it would be MUCH easier in the Med, with multiple port stops and the ability to resupply, than it would be on the open ocean) - it is far more likely that material from Syria gradually spread across the Med as trade technology improved, eventually resulting in short-distance trades between the British Isles and coastal France.

Don't forget, we're talking 5,000 years ago. Do you think that trade was that complex, even then?

Do you think it is simpler to travel many hundreds of miles past lots of potential trading sites?

You're looking at it in the manner a creationist looks at evolution - it isn't as though the end-state (trade in goods between Syria and the British Isles) was a pre-determined destination - it is simply the place things arrived after a lot of small steps along the way.

Weaver wrote:

jamest wrote:Yeah but we're talking about 5,000 years ago. I'm no expert but suspect they had nothing like that back then. Plus the Pacific is open water, whereas the route between Britain & Syria would have required more precise navigation (several turns etc.)... to be done on a regular basis.

Do you really think it's easier to navigate over open water to small landing sites (islands in an ocean) than it is to navigate within range of shore sightings to confirm position and other needed references?

And the Polynesians completed their expansion/migration about 3,000 years ago - but didn't have the advantages of the Bronze Age technological advancements or the multiple cultures with which to engage in trade in knowledge and materials. They did it all with Stone Age technology.

Weaver wrote:Here's a comparison between the Mediterranean Sea and the central Pacific Ocean for scale - the blue line represents the linear distance, West to East, across the Med (the greatest possible expanse of "open sea" journey for someone travelling from the British Isles to Syria).

The program corrects for projection distortions, so scaling is accurate.

http://mapfrappe.com/?show=44651

Note that the Med distance barely accounts for the travel distance from New Guinea to Micronesia - and is between 1/2 and 1/3 the distance needed to get to Hawaii.

No, it is certainly not easier to travel over the open ocean.

jamest wrote:
Fair enough, I understand your point, it's just that I didn't imagine so much organised trade would be going on 5,000 years ago.

Abstract
The Neolithic and Bronze Age transitions were profound cultural shifts catalyzed in parts of Europe by migrations, first of early farmers from the Near East and then Bronze Age herders from the Pontic Steppe. However, a decades-long, unresolved controversy is whether population change or cultural adoption occurred at the Atlantic edge, within the British Isles. We address this issue by using the first whole genome data from prehistoric Irish individuals. A Neolithic woman (3343–3020 cal BC) from a megalithic burial (10.3× coverage) possessed a genome of predominantly Near Eastern origin. She had some hunter–gatherer ancestry but belonged to a population of large effective size, suggesting a substantial influx of early farmers to the island. Three Bronze Age individuals from Rathlin Island (2026–1534 cal BC), including one high coverage (10.5×) genome, showed substantial Steppe genetic heritage indicating that the European population upheavals of the third millennium manifested all of the way from southern Siberia to the western ocean. This turnover invites the possibility of accompanying introduction of Indo-European, perhaps early Celtic, language. Irish Bronze Age haplotypic similarity is strongest within modern Irish, Scottish, and Welsh populations, and several important genetic variants that today show maximal or very high frequencies in Ireland appear at this horizon. These include those coding for lactase persistence, blue eye color, Y chromosome R1b haplotypes, and the hemochromatosis C282Y allele; to our knowledge, the first detection of a known Mendelian disease variant in prehistory. These findings together suggest the establishment of central attributes of the Irish genome 4,000 y ago.