Ancient humans may have reached remote Japanese islands deliberately

Very recommendable! Latest since Thor Heyerdahl's famous Kon-Tiki expedition in 1947, we are learning more and more that our distant ancestors were master navigators of the high seas! Another amazing feat!

"Archaeological sites on six of these isles — part of a 1,200-kilometer-long chain — indicate that migrations to the islands occurred 35,000 to 30,000 years ago, both from the south via Taiwan and from the north via the Japanese island of Kyushu. ... Researchers analyzed 138 buoys that were released near or passed by Taiwan and the Philippine island Luzon from 1989 to 2017, deployed as part of the Global Drifter Program to map surface ocean currents worldwide. In findings published online December 3 in Scientific Reports, the team found that only four of the buoys came within 20 kilometers of any of the Ryukyu Islands, and these did so only as a result of typhoons and other adverse weather."

"... Paleolithic maritime activity is poorly understood. Here, we show evidence of deliberate crossing of challenging ocean that occurred 35,000–30,000 years ago in another region of the western Pacific, the Ryukyu Islands of southwestern Japan. Our analysis of satellite-tracked buoys drifting in the actual ocean demonstrated that accidental drift does not explain maritime migration to this 1200 km-long chain of islands, where the local ocean flows have kept the same since the late Pleistocene. Migration to the Ryukyus is difficult because it requires navigation across one of the world’s strongest current, the Kuroshio ..."

Ancient humans may have reached remote Japanese islands deliberately | Science News Satellite-tracked buoys suggest there’s little chance the remote isles were reached by accident

Here is the respective research report:

Palaeolithic voyage for invisible islands beyond the horizon (free access; I think the title for this research paper is poorly chosen. It does not even remotely convey the significance of their research results)