It’s time to admit it: We have a long-standing love affair with the sea, yet we don’t swim very well and have a real hard time breathing water. The only thing we have going for us is our big brains, and that’s why we invented boats.

People have been using boats for at least 40,000 years (that’s when Australia was first settled, and there’s no way to walk there). No vessels from that time survive, though we can guess from boats built by other Stone Age cultures that survived into the modern era that those boats would have been absolutely terrifying on the open sea. How would you like to be out on the deep blue in a hollowed-out log? No thank you.