Dugouts can range from simple one man canoes to long, slender, and fast outrigger war canoes, and large dual hull dugouts that can carry sail.
Dugouts are the oldest boats ever found by archeologists, but this may be owed more to their massive construction than them predating hide or bark boats which would not survive as well. Nobody really knows if the others were first, but dugouts date without a doubt to the early Stone Age. A dugout has been found in a riverbed in Ireland that was dated to 7000 B.C., and one in Africa dating to 8000 B.C. The ancient Greeks also used dugouts and called them monooxylon which means "single tree".
Controlled burning and stone adzes have been used for making dugouts from time immemorial. Cutting or hacking grooves and splitting out the wood between the grooves is another possible method, but fire seems to have been the preferred method in most places. Native Americans in many areas used dugout canoes, from small ones of pine or cottonwood, to large seagoing whale hunters built from the giant redwoods on the pacific coast.
Pacific islanders made outrigger dugouts capable of long sea voyages. They had settled most Pacific islands before Magellan first ventured into those waters. The native people of New Guinea, famous for their trophy head collecting, had fast thin streamlined outrigger war canoes. Some Pacific dugout canoes, were equipped with triangular or “crab claw” wicker sails. Outriggers can bear small sails, and dual hull dugouts can carry somewhat more sail. It is possible that Islamic traders first conceived of the lateen sail in the Indian or Pacific Ocean after having seen a native rigged dugout.
It is almost a certainty that the people who settled Easter Island, and built hundreds of large totem heads, reached that island in outrigger dugout canoes. They were probably without, but perhaps with, sails.
A large dugout bearing a Stonehenge type stone was excavated from a riverbed in England, and seems to be contemporaneous with the construction of that monument. Dugouts were used by poorer Norse farmers who couldn’t afford longboats, and some were large enough to transport as many as 6 cows to market. Building boats in this style persisted in Europe despite knowledge of much more sophisticated boat building techniques due to their simplicity and ease of construction. Dugout log boats were still being built in England in the early 18th Century, and in Poland and eastern Europe in the 1930's. The log boat is an amazing chapter in the history of transportation.
