Imagine a group of Homo erectus, the earliest members of our family genus, living near a coastline on an Indonesia island and well aware of a lush island that is visible only a few miles offshore. One day while on the coast, a herd of elephants emerges from the nearby forest and crosses the beach. They enter the ocean and swim successfully to the offshore island. Could this be the experience that triggers a creative process in our ancestors who are watching nearby? Does their imagination and thinking include not only a desire to reach that island, but ideas about how to do so? Could this period of creative thought conclude with the invention of a raft large enough to hold several people, food and water? If we can find evidence of this situation in the dim past, in the early days of Homo erectus, then archeologists are fixing the time and place for one of the extraordinary events in all human history, a major advance in the evolution of the human mind.
I hope they rode on the backs of elephants. Though I think that by the time they had the understanding and skill set necessary to build even basic rafts, the mental revolution must have already occurred. I suppose there'd be some amount of feedback with tool use encouraging the skills to use them. Maybe there was no eureka moment, just a gradual transition from using floating aids accidentally, to building simple rafts to cross rivers and finally simple ocean-going vessels... nevertheless, the start and end points look distinctly different. It's also fascinating to consider that a different species of human may have evolved complex tool use.
http://scribol.com/science/paleontology/homo-erectus-crosses-the-open-ocean/
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