Anthropology professor Gregory Possehl's boat currently rests 6,000 feet beneath the Arabian Sea.
After only hours on the water, the Magan III, a 40-foot boat made of reeds and bitumen -- a tar-like substance -- began sinking as heavy winds rocked the craft and water spilled over the sides.
"At 8:30, I heard the boat was in trouble, and at about 10 to nine I heard the boat had sunk," said Possehl, curator of the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology's Asian section.
We're still wary of these sorts of projects. They no doubt give some idea of the difficulties in creating things, but on the other hand, the ancient people had hundreds of years to develop techniques for building and operating things that we would have no way of accessing. We tend to think it probably provides a false sense of security over what we know about ancient technology.