What are the stages of traversals of the Mediterranean Sea?

Dugout canoe

Dugout canoe

Dugouts are the oldest boat type archaeologists have found, dating back about 8,000 years to the Neolithic Stone Age

Pesse canoe

Pesse canoe

The Pesse canoe is believed to be the world's oldest known boat, and certainly the oldest known canoe. Carbon dating indicates that the boat was constructed during the early mesolithic period between 8040 BCE and 7510 BCE

Uru boat

Indus Valley to Mesopotamia

Boats played an important role in the commerce between the Indus Valley Civilization and Mesopotamia.[13]

Uru boat

The Uru, or "Fat Boat", is a generic name for large Dhow-type wooden ships made by asharis in Beypore, a village south of Kozhikode, Kerala, in the southwestern coast of India.

This type of boat has been used by the Arabs since ancient times as trading vessels, and even now, urus are being manufactured and exported to Arab nations from Beypore. These boats used to be built of several types of wood, the main one being teak. The teak was taken from Nilambur forests in earlier times, but now imported Malaysian teak is used. A couple of boat-building yards can still be found near the Beypore port

Herodotus

The historians Herodotus, Pliny the Elder and Strabo record the use of boats for commerce, travel, and military purposes.[14]

Hjortspring boat

Hjortspring boat

Thousands of rock carvings from this period depict ships, and the large stone burial monuments known as stone ships, suggest that ships and seafaring played an important role in the culture at large. The depicted ships most likely represent sewn plank built canoes used for warfare, fishing and trade. These ship types may have their origin as far back as the neolithic period and they continue into the Pre-Roman Iron Age, as exemplified by the Hjortspring boat.[42]

Praise of the two lands

Praise of the two lands

"Praise of the Two Lands", appearing in an inscription (c. 2613 BCE) of boat building projects of Egyptian pharaoh Sneferu, is the first reference to a ship bearing a name.

Sealand dynasty

Sealand dynasty

The Sealand Dynasty, (URU.KÙKInb 12) or the 2nd Dynasty of Babylon (although it was independent of Amorite-ruled Babylon), very speculatively c. 1732–1460 BC (short chronology), is an enigmatic series of kings attested to primarily in laconic references in the king lists A and B, and as contemporaries recorded on the Assyrian Synchronistic king list A.117. The dynasty, which had broken free of the short lived, and by this time crumbling Babylonian Empire, was named for the province in the far south of Mesopotamia

Sea peoples

Sea peoples

The Sea Peoples are a purported seafaring confederation that attacked ancient Egypt and other regions of the East Mediterranean prior to and during the Late Bronze Age collapse (1200–900 BCE)

Battle against Sherden sea pirates

Ramesses II

In his second year, Ramesses II decisively defeated the Sherden sea pirates who were wreaking havoc along Egypt's Mediterranean coast by attacking cargo-laden vessels travelling the sea routes to Egypt.[20]

My answer

I think we can clearly see the history of Ship building is far larger than something created by only Phoenicians.

However is there any truth to Phoenicians being linked to large scale seafaring?

Phoenicians

Early historic references

Years later, other waves of Sea People, the Sherden included, were defeated by Merneptah, son of Ramesses II, and Ramesses III. An Egyptian work written around 1100 BC, the Onomasticon of Amenope, documents the presence of the Sherden in Palestine.12 After being defeated by Pharaoh Ramsses III, they, along with other "Sea Peoples", would be allowed to settle in that territory, subject to Egyptian rule.

The Italian orientalist Giovanni Garbini identified the territory settled by the Sherden in Northern Palestine as the one occupied, according to the Bible, by the Israelite tribe of Zebulun, where also appears a village named Sared.[13][14][15]

So, who are the Phoenicians?

Phoenicians

Phoenician

Phoenicia (/fəˈnɪʃə/;5 from Ancient Greek: Φοινίκη, Phoiníkē) was an ancient Semitic-speaking thalassocratic civilization that originated in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, specifically modern Lebanon.6 It was concentrated along the coast of Lebanon and included some coastal areas of Syria and northern Palestine reaching as far north as Arwad and as far south as Acre and possibly Gaza.810 At its height between 1100 and 200 BC, Phoenician civilization spread across the Mediterranean, from Cyprus to the Iberian Peninsula.

So therefore, shipping could not have possibly been a creation solely of the Phoenicians, though it is possible the Phoenicians were the Sherden.

Who the Sherden were, and why they had taken to the sea's would be theory, not fact. Whether it be due to the Minoan eruption. They were definitely advanced when it came to Seafaring.

However there is evidence of long distance shipping which pre-dates the Sea-peoples.

I also do not agree that contemporary historians are of the opinion that even the most ancient boating was necessarily only conducted close to the shore.

Though, they have no archaeological evidence that it was not, common sense might suggest otherwise.

History

History

Boats have served as transportation since the earliest times.1 Circumstantial evidence, such as the early settlement of Australia over 40,000 years ago, findings in Crete dated 130,000 years ago,2 and in Flores dated to 900,000 years ago

Origins

Origins

The ancestors of present-day Aboriginal Australians migrated from Asia by sea during the Pleistocene era