At what point did humans build boats to travel on water (any water, even single person canoe type boats?)
When were the first "ships" used? (By ship, I mean a larger vessel with the specific intention of crossing a bigger stretch of water.)
Any other info on this subject would be great as well. I did try the search function but didn't find what I was looking for exactly. If i missed it or if my question is unclear, I apologize.
The absolute latest possible answer is 40.000 years ago, with the colonisation of Australia. To go to Australia one has to cross the Sunda strait (all the other straits between the current Indonesian islands were dryland due to the effects of the glaciation on sea level).
However, recently some hard-to-date handaxes were found on Crete, also an island. These look like they are Middle Paleolithic, meaning they might have belonged to Neanderthals or related species. This might push the earliest date for boats back to about 100.000 years.
Personally I would not be too surprised about early dates for boats; while previously we thought only modern humans made use of seafood resources, while Neanderthals lived exclusively on large terrestrial herbivores, this image is changing too. While of course one could just collect shells and fish on a beach, I see no reason to exclude the possibility that Neanderthals also went out to sea (even though we have no Neanderthal harpoons or fishhooks).
The earliest actual canoe that we have is dated to roughly 8000 years BC (10.000 years ago), from Pesse in the Netherlands.