"The ancient Greeks used dugouts and called them monooxylon, which means 'single tree.'"
John Crandall, Dugout Canoes
Sometimes there is no real need to be clever, or complex, or even particularly sophisticated when it comes to inventions. Sometimes simple wins.
This is definitely the case with the dugout canoe. The people of 7500 B.C.E. needed a way to travel on water, but many of the materials used in the very earliest boatbuilding still lay a long way ahead in the future. So they came up with a simple answer using the technology that was accessible to them.
The dugout canoe is, in its most basic terms, a hollowed-out log, nothing more than a tree trunk laid down on its side and its interior removed. All that was required was that the hollowed log had to be big enough for at least one person to sit inside, and the wood had to be sound, not rotten. If a log fulfilled these two criteria, it was a potential canoe. As these vessels were made before the invention of metal tools, the logs were hollowed out using a controlled fire and a sharpened rock implement (known as an adze) to scrape away the burned wood. Then, to reduce drag in the water, the front and the back of the log were fashioned into a point.
Dugout canoes have been excavated in various locations in northern Europe and are the oldest form of boat ever discovered. Before their arrival there were no other forms of water travel in existence—only swimming and clinging to driftwood.
