circa 3100 BCE. The earliest seaborne trading route, however, is known from the 7th millennium BCE in the Aegean Sea. It involved the seaborne movement of obsidian by an unknown Neolithic Europe seafaring people. The obsidian were mined from the volcanic island of Milos and then transported to various parts of the Balkans, Anatolia, and Cyprus, where they were refined into obsidian blades. However, the nature of the seafaring technologies involved have not been preserved. Austronesians were the first humans to invent oceangoing sailing technologies by at least 2000 BCE - namely the lashed-lug boat-building technique, the catamaran, and the crab claw sail. This allowed them to colonize a large part of the Indo-Pacific region during the Austronesian expansion. The Austronesian expansion started in Taiwan around 3000 BCE and eventually spread across the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Prior to the 16th century Colonial Era, Austronesians were the most widespread ethnolinguistic group, spanning half the planet from Easter Island in the eastern Pacific Ocean to Madagascar in the western Indian Ocean. The crab claw sails and tanja sails of the Austronesians from western Island Southeast Asia possibly influenced the development of the Arab lateen sail. The junk rigs commonly associated with Chinese ships is also believed to be an Austronesian invention which the Chinese encountered and adopted by the second century after contact with Austronesian traders. The Ancient Egyptians had knowledge of sail construction. The Greek historian Herodotus states that Necho II sent out an expedition of Phoenicians, which in two and a half years sailed from the Red Sea around Africa to the mouth of the Nile. As they sailed south and then west, they observed that the mid-day sun was to the north. Their contemporaries did not believe them, but modern historians take this as evidence that they were south of the equator. Age of Navigation By 1000 BC, Austronesians in Island Southeast Asia were already engaging in regular maritime trade with China, South Asia, and the Middle East, introducing sailing technologies to these regions. They also facilitated an exchange of cultivated crop plants, introducing Pacific coconuts, bananas, and sugarcane to the Indian subcontinent, some of which eventually reached Europe via overland Persian and Arab traders. A Chinese record in 200 AD describes one of the Austronesian ships, called kunlun bo or k'unlun po (崑崙舶, lit. "ship of the Kunlun people"). It may also have been the "kolandiaphonta" known