In 1987 a Fulani herdsman while digging a well found a canoe, 8.4 metres long, which was carved from a single tree. Radiocarbon dating put it at roughly 8,000–8,500 years old which makes it the oldest boat ever found in Africa, and the second oldest in the world (only a Dutch canoe is older).
It proved that People were already navigating waterways in what is now northeastern Nigeria, thousands of years before the pyramids. Humans in what now became the Northeastern Nigeria were building boats while much of the world was still in the Stone Age.