As you know, before people began to engage in agriculture, they had two main occupations - hunting and fishing. Until recently, scientists believed that man learned to catch and eat fish much later than to hunt animals. However, recent historical research indicates that fishing existed long before the advent of homo sapience - "Homo sapiens".
Hula Valley bonfires
So, during excavations in the Hula Valley (Israel), bones of fish and crabs were found, as well as traces of bonfires. According to experts from the Hebrew University, there were once many lakes in these parts, in which giant fish were found. Judging by the remains, the length of the body of catfish, tilapia and carp, which were caught from there 750,000 years ago, was more than a meter.
As you can see, this was long before people of the modern type appeared on Earth. Scientists call our distant ancestor of those times "homo erectus" ("Homo erectus"). However, he was not so primitive, since he knew how to fish and fry it over a fire. The fact that the fish was cooked on the fire, and not eaten raw, was confirmed by laboratory studies.
How did the ancients catch fish?
In the Stone and Bronze Age, fish were already caught with a net. Traces of an ancient fishing industry have been found in Alaska, in what is now the Baltic region. The first fishing nets began to be made in the VI millennium BC. In addition to them, primitive people used nonsense and seines, which were woven from bast, nettle, hemp and sedge. Some nets were intended for large fish, others for small ones. The most popular fish for fishing in those days were roach and bleak.
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Imprints of mesh cells are found on shards of clay vessels found during excavations. You can even see the peculiarities of weaving. When the nets became unusable for their intended purpose, they were wrapped around blanks of grass and moss, on which pots were molded.
Today archaeologists often find long thin stakes sharpened at the ends in the water sediments of ancient peat settlements. Ancient fishermen tied nets and fish traps to them. Thus, in Lithuania, at the site of one of the Neolithic sites, the remains of oars, birch bark floats and scraps of nets woven from linden bark were found in the layers of peat.
During spawning, representatives of the Neolithic and Bronze eras blocked the river with so-called "stabs" made of brushwood and branches of coniferous trees. The fishes got stuck in the "zakol" and could be taken with bare hands.
Other ways to catch fish were with stakes driven into the river bottom or tied willow twigs. When a decent amount of fish gathered there, they would beat them with bone harpoons and spears. Small fish were caught with a net. But large fish, such as pike, catfish or sturgeon, were caught using a bow and arrows with jagged edges. The finds indicate that fishing was carried out from boats as well. For this, fishing tackle, prototypes of modern fishing rods and donoks were used.
Sometimes archaeologists also come across fishing sinkers. In the III-VI millennia BC, for this they used ordinary pebbles, which were tied or wrapped in bast or birch bark. Later, they began to grind the sinkers out of stone. Bone points were tied to them - it turned out to be a semblance of a modern fish hook. Fishing with live bait was also practiced: small fish were planted on flint and bone gutters and waited for a large fish to swallow the bait.
Fishermen of primitive Russia
According to researchers, the sturgeon was the most common fish for fishing on the territory of Russia in the primitive era. In the region of the Irtysh River, it was found one and a half million years ago. Presumably the archanthropus caught sturgeons on the shallows with their hands, later they began to use stones and sticks for this.
In the peat bogs in the area of Dubna near Moscow, an international group of archaeologists came across fishing tackle, which is more than 7,500 years old. There were devices made of wood, flint and bone, traps in the form of wicker baskets, hooks, harpoons, sinkers, floats, needles for weaving and repairing nets, knives for cleaning fish made from elk ribs … Also excrement and fish remains were preserved. It turned out that there was no agriculture in this region until the Iron Age. The main craft of local residents was hunting and fishing. Moreover, the ancient Dubna residents consumed fish not only fresh, but also dried and smoked, storing it for future use. One of the ways of harvesting was to keep the catch in the backwaters in the cold. Frozen fish was eaten in winter, when it was impossible to fish.
The finds made in the Nizhny Novgorod region are also curious. The tribes inhabiting this territory settled on the shores of reservoirs, as a rule, rich in fish.
In the century before last, the Russian archaeologist Count Alexei Uvarov wrote that bones and scales of pike, bream and sterlet were found at a Neolithic site located on the banks of the Oka. True, the local tribes, apparently, did not cook fish on fires, but consumed it in a slightly salted form, or even completely raw. Researchers were able to study the remains of digested food in the stomachs of ancient people. It turned out that together with fresh fish, various parasites got into their bodies. It is not surprising that many died early from disease …
But one way or another, people began to catch, eat fish and cook it back in time immemorial. It just happened somewhere earlier, and somewhere later.
Irina Shlionskaya