The presence of boats, or the prahu, in Indonesia is as old as human existence in the archipelago. When early humans inhabited the caves, boats were part of their lives. Some of those caves illustrate prehistoric boats that may have been used by those who painted them or perhaps by their ancestors of several prior generations, the Australo-Melanesians who migrated from Sundaland to Wallacea, the islands beyond, in search of new livelihoods. There is a report of a boat painting in caves of the Little Kei Island in eastern Indonesia. Reproduction of the cave imprint presented by Intan (1998) shows the boat as a dugout with additional structure and projecting bows. This painting resembles the boat painting with pictures of men, animals, and the sun along with pictures of long boats called kora-korafound in East Timor reported by Ruy Cinatti in 1963. All those boats were single-bodied dugout canoes without outriggers, although some of them show additional construction for poles and sails...
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Salam, A. (2014). Boats in Indonesia. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_10239-1
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