Evidence from a Sweet Potato

It is easy to dismiss pre-historic men as somehow being lesser than we are; we think them less inteligent, less human. Because of this tendency, it is particularly important to take note when we find evidence that they have exceeded the bounds we have put on their capacity.

In this case, we look at the Polynesians, who apparently made it as far as South America, long enough to gather food samples that would later become crops on their home islands.1

This is particularly noteworthy, as I do not doubt it would be a chalenge for even many of our best engineers to design a boat capable of doing this with the technology they had, and without "cheating:" using things like computers to help with the design and testing steps. As much as we have learned about engineering, about stresses and forces, about building, could we better their feat? In a sense yes, we have - we have gone into space. However, in a different sense, we have not: those who made space travel possible were not better than those who built a wooden boat for crossing the Pacific, nor were they necessarily even smarter. Rather, they simply benefited from the work of those who had gone before, with more of those having gone before and more of that knowledge available to them, than our pre-historic Polynesians had.