Dominique Goerlitz, a lecturer, is about to set sail eastward from New York in a boat built from reeds, to test the theory that the ancients made it back across the Atlantic from the New World.
His inspiration? A lowly 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 spring 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," Goerlitz said. "'We assume it got there under its own power,' I was told. 'Ask the archaeologists'."
"The archaeologists didn't know either, and they sent Goerlitz to the ethnologists, who also didn't know."
Read more...
The Abora, the reed boat, sets sail in less than 24 hours (July 11, 2007). You can watch its progress here.
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