Oldest Vessel of the World—the Pesse Canoe

Hans Faber
Nov 21, 2020
4 min read

Updated: Sep 5

The Pesse Canoe. The world’s oldest known water vessel was discovered near the village of Pesse in the Dutch province of Drenthe. Dated to between 8040 and 7510 BC, it predates even the great cradles of civilization such as Egypt and Mesopotamia. Yes, you read that correctly—feel free to go back and check the date.

The Pesse dugout canoe is carved from Scots pine, measuring about 3 meters in length and 45 centimeters in width. Its front is left thick and solid, giving it a kind of primitive forecastle. The vessel was hollowed out with a stone axe—naturally, since it dates to the Mesolithic period—though tools of antler or bone may also have been employed. It is unlikely that fire was used in the process. And why pine instead of the sturdier oak? Simply because pine was the pioneer vegetation that spread after the last ice age, the Weichselian glaciation.

This unique artifact of human history was almost lost to oblivion. In 1955, while building a road, construction workers stumbled upon a large chunk of wood and dismissed it as nothing special. Tossed onto a dump truck, it would have vanished—had it not bounced off on a dirt road and later caught the eye of local crofter Hendrik Wanders. Unlike the workers, Hendrik sensed it might be something remarkable and alerted the Biologisch-Archeologisch Instituut, directed at the time by Professor Tjalling Waterbolk. The rest, as they say, is history. For his keen eye, Hendrik was rewarded with 150 guilders (about 600 USD today) and a lifelong membership to the museum. A generous prize for what seemed a modest discovery. After all, if the Drents Museum had to reward everyone who stumbled upon the world’s oldest vessel, its budget would have sunk long ago.

The canoe owes its remarkable preservation to the peat soil in which it was buried. Sealed off from oxygen at a depth of about 2 to 2.5 meters, the vessel remained protected for millennia, waiting to resurface in the twentieth century.

A replica was made to demonstrate that the canoe really could float—even when manned by (very) well-fed modern humans. The replica, built by Jaap Beuker, then conservator of the Drents Museum, was tested at a small fen near the village of Witten in Drenthe. With this experiment, the arguments of some scholars—that the dugout canoe was perhaps just a pig trough or even a chest—were countered. Unless pig troughs were secretly designed for weekend boating trips. The main objection of the critics had been the canoe’s round base, supposedly unfit for navigation. But it turned out not only that it floated perfectly well, but also that other ancient canoes had the same round base. And as for the ‘trough theory’: that was far-fetched too, since no animal husbandry existed in the region at the time. Ouch.

Check this short movie to watch a replica floating, spoken in the Low Saxon speech, by the way.

The oldest boat on the planet is on display at the Drents Museum in Assen—a wonderful regional museum in its own right.

Note 1 — The Pesse Canoe has a worthy contender: the Dufuna Canoe, discovered in Nigeria in 1987 and dated between 6,500 and 6,000 BC. Another ancient European canoe is the Lurgan Canoe from Ireland, dated ‘only’ to 2,000 BC.

Note 2 — We had to get a bit creative linking this canoe to the Frisia Coast Trail, since the trail itself lies still 55 kilometers from Pesse as the crow flies. That said, the province of Drenthe (formerly Drentland) was the fourth so-called Sealand of greater Frisia during the High Middle Ages. If you think we stretched the argument too far, we won’t entirely disagree.

Looking even further back to the Late Iron Age, Frisians (Frisii or Fresones) might have inhabited parts of what is now Drenthe, and they might even be linked to the death of the Girl of Yde. Yde is a village—read our blog post The Killing Fields—of the Celts for more on this ancient history. Additionally, it is from this wider region that, around 5,000 BC, the so-called forefather of all Germanic tribes lived, whose DNA later spread into Scandinavia and eventually across Northwest Europe. See our blog post White Rabbit Down the Hole. The Spread of a Coastal DNA.

Note 3 — Featured image Pesse Canoe by Jaap Beuker.

Suggested hiking

Because this is a hiking weblog, too, we point out that Green Planet has developed a nice short hike, Kano van Pesse ('canoe of Pesse'), which also takes you to the spot where the canoe was found. Please, also find the walking guide they made for this hike.