> In terms of the results themselves, the boats are extremely seaworthy crafts. When you get in them for the first time, you don't think that, because they're very, very light. They feel very flimsy, and they're very low in the water compared to a modern sailing boat. So you feel really in touch with the wave, which is kind of scary. But because they're so flexible and because of the way they're rigged, they're actually really stable, even in big waves.

> "We kept going out thinking, 'Oh, this is maybe the limit of what this boat can tolerate,' and then it would be fine, and we'd be, 'Okay, let's go a little bit in slightly bigger waves with slightly stronger wind,'" Jarrett continued. "So I think our comfort zones definitely visibly expanded during that period. And I had the chance to work with the same crews over three years. By the end of those three years, we were doing stuff that we would never have been able to do at the beginning."

Sounds like they had fun.

I can't help but be remembered of the discovery of the HMS Terror, one of John Franklin's missing ships. It was announced that it was discovered conveniently located in what was already called Terror Bay, and that the ship's masts were even sticking out of the water. The local Inuit of course knew it was there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_Bay

a true scientist: He even fashioned rudimentary blades out of his own frozen feces to test whether they could cut through pig hide, muscle, and tendon ... it did not work.

bored and shored? board boats of boards o'er fjords. might strike a chord, see a fnord, expand your gourd

So not really like Vikings, but like Jekt traders. It looks like there is little written about the Jekt trade in English.

• vidarh

  today at 11:25 AM

  Yes and no, as the article says:

  > "The Viking Age ends in the 11th century, and we're talking about boats from 800 years later," he said. "But the construction techniques and the way they are rigged and their general performance characteristics are similar enough. Because this is a project about voyages and not a project about boat building, it seemed like a defensible analogy."

  His guess - whether right or not - is that this ship-structure is similar enough that it serves as a possible way to identify possible Viking era landing places.

> Others have tried to cook like the Neanderthals, concluding that flint flakes were surprisingly effective for butchering birds, and that roasting the birds damages the bones to such an extent that it's unlikely they would be preserved in the archaeological record.

I found this statement a bit alarming, as flint flakes being quite effective in butchering is quite well known — anyone who has practiced or studied “primitive living” ( that term doesn’t feel right…) would know.

However, that was not an explicit conclusion in the referenced paper, just by arstechnica. Not even a gripe, though, very interesting article!

• ethan_smith

  today at 7:39 AM

  Flint fractures conchoidally to produce edges as sharp as 30 angstroms - sharper than modern surgical steel which typically reaches only about 300-600 angstroms.

• potato3732842

  today at 10:07 AM

  They're probably looking for something more specific than "can make something that works well enough for youtube", like seeing if an exact copy of flint found in a site yields the same leftover marks as found on other bones in the site, or something.

There’s an old NOVA episode “This Old Pyramid” that applied experimental archaeology to the Egyptian pyramids: exploring how the pyramids were built by actually building one.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1460448/

• BostonFern

  today at 11:42 AM

  The follow-up attempt in 1999 where the team succeeds in raising a large obelisk by slowly draining sand out of a pit underneath it is a great watch.

• eesmith

  today at 10:47 AM

  Going even further back in time, Kon-Tiki back in 1947 demonstrated it was indeed possible to travel on a balsa wood raft to get from South America to Polynesia, settling that part of the debate.

  Of course, Heyerdahl's diffusion model was completely wrong, but that's a different topic.