World's Oldest Shipwreck Suggests Advanced Maritime Networks 5,000 Years Ago

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6gr80rk1yyko

A fascinating reminder that the world was already becoming interconnected over 5,000 years ago. New evidence for maritime trade in the 3rd millennium BCE suggests that seafarers were moving goods, materials and ideas across surprisingly large distances long before the classical civilisations of Greece and Rome emerged. What makes this especially interesting is that the three largest and most economically significant centres of the period, the Indus Valley Civilisation, Mesopotamia and Egypt, were separated by vast distances yet linked by growing demand for raw materials, prestige goods, metals and agricultural products, making maritime connectivity not merely plausible but increasingly necessary for sustaining complex societies. This aligns closely with the Dravidian Arc research framework, which argues that long-distance maritime exchange was not an exception but an increasingly important feature of early civilisation. The deeper we dig into the archaeological record, the more it appears that complex trade networks were already connecting major population centres thousands of years before the Age of Exploration. Columbus and da Gama did not invent oceanic commerce; they entered a world where maritime networks had already been evolving, expanding and linking civilisations for millennia.