The good stuff is always on the other side of the river

My brother says the berries over there are bigger. My brother can't swim. — Forager, about 9000 BC

The oldest boat anybody's found is a hollowed-out pine log about 10 feet long. A Dutch road crew dug it out of a bog in 1955 and dumped it. It rolled off a cart, and a local man took it home in a wheelbarrow. Some experts later decided it was a feeding trough, never mind that nobody around there kept livestock yet. A museum finally built a copy and put people in it. It floated. Troughs don't.

Still bugs us: the other side still has better berries.

The full file

It isn't much of a boat. About 10 feet long and only 16 or 17 inches wide. You'd want to sit still. It's on display at the Drents Museum in Assen, which calls it the oldest boat in the world.

That's the oldest one anybody's dug up, not the oldest one anybody made. Africa's oldest, a dugout found at Dufuna in northeastern Nigeria, is about 8,000 years old. And on Crete, which has been an island for millions of years, there are stone tools at least 130,000 years old. Nobody walked there. Somebody crossed open sea, long before any boat we've found.

The good stuff was on the other side then too.

Relates to No. 03050.