Around 8000 B.C., a canoe carved from a single pine log came to rest in what is now the Netherlands. The roughly 10-foot-long (3 meters) boat wasn't discovered until 1955, when a road crew unearthed it from a peat bog near the village of Pesse. The artifact, now known as the Pesse canoe, is the world's oldest physical example of a boat.
But there is significant indirect evidence that humans have been using boats for much longer than 10,000 years. So exactly when did humans invent boats?
