Boat
A boat is a watercraft of a large range of types and sizes, but generally smaller than a ship,
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Differentiation from other prehistoric watercraft
The earliest watercraft are considered to have been rafts. These would have been used for voyages such as the settlement of Australia sometime between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago.
A boat differs from a raft by obtaining its buoyancy by having most of its structure exclude water with a waterproof layer, e.g. the planks of a wooden hull, the hide covering (or tarred canvas) of a currach. In contrast, a raft is buoyant because it joins together components that are themselves buoyant, for example, logs, bamboo poles, bundles of reeds, floats (such as inflated hides, sealed pottery containers or, in a modern context, empty oil drums). The key difference between a raft and a boat is that the former is a "flow through" structure, with waves able to pass up through it. Consequently, except for short river crossings, a raft is not a practical means of transport in colder regions of the world as the users would be at risk of hypothermia. Today that climatic limitation restricts rafts to between 40° north and 40° south, with, in the past, similar boundaries that have moved as the world's climate has varied.[2]: 11
Types
The earliest boats may have been either dugouts or hide boats.[2]: 11 The oldest recovered boat in the world, the Pesse canoe, found in the Netherlands, is a dugout made from the hollowed tree trunk of a Pinus sylvestris that was constructed somewhere between 8200 and 7600 BC. This canoe is exhibited in the Drents Museum in Assen, Netherlands.[3][4] Other very old dugout boats have also been recovered.[5][6][7] Hide boats, made from covering a framework with animal skins, could be equally as old as logboats, but such a structure is much less likely to survive in an archaeological context.[8]: ch 4 Northern Europe
Plank-built boats are considered, in most cases, to have developed from the logboat. There are examples of logboats that have been expanded: by deforming the hull under the influence of heat, by raising up the sides with added planks, or by splitting down the middle and adding a central plank to make it wider. (Some of these methods have been in quite recent use – there is no simple developmental sequence). The earliest known plank-built boats are from the Nile, dating to the third millennium BC. Outside Egypt, the next earliest are from England. The Ferriby boats are dated to the early part of the second millennium BC and the end of the third millennium.[8]: ch 4 Northern Europe; Mediterranean Region Plank-built boats require a level of woodworking technology that was first available in the neolithic with more complex versions only becoming achievable in the Bronze Age.[9]: 59
| Weight | 4 |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 30/40 cm |
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