This 2014 video is called Ancient Fishing. Peru.
From Archaeo News:
Basques were fishermen more than 8,000 years ago
The Basques that settled 8,300 years ago in the Jaizkibel Mountain near the Basque coast were skillful enough to go fishing two kilometres out to sea.
Those ancient humans set sail out to sea fishing, something which meant 50 percent of their diet, Aranzadi society of sciences reported after examining archaeological remains found in Gipuzkoa.
They did not hunt whales, as their descendants many years after, neither tuna nor anchovy as the current Basque fishermen but the Basques that settled some 8,300 years ago between the Pasaia and Hondarribia coast, were skillful enough to set sail one or two kilometres out to sea to fish.
Moving from Paleolithic to Neolithic and immersed in climatic and cultural changes, men had no alternative but to search for new ways to get food and made their way out to sea, Alvaro Arrizabalaga, member of the Aranzadi Society of Sciences and Prehistory professor at the Basque Public University explains.
The remains discovered in Gipuzkoa show a man between 30 and 40 years old with a diet consisting on some species of fishes that are usually caught some kilometres far from the coast.
Other human remains found in some caves in the Spanish region of Asturias showed similar conclusions.
More Basque archaeology here.
Fishing history here.
Medieval history of sea fishing in England: here.
A new study from The Australian National University (ANU) has revealed new insights into ancient fishing throughout history, including what type of fish people were regularly eating as part of their diet. The study looked at fish bones unearthed in an archaeological dig on the Indonesian island of Alor — home to the world’s oldest fish-hooks ever found in a human burial site, dating back to about 12,000 years: here.
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Stone age fishing altered ocean wildlife populations more than previously believed
By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
The world’s oceans once teemed with life. In Europe, for example, blue whales, orcas and sharks filled the waters, porpoises explored rivers looking for fish and dolphins swam near the coast.
But new research finds that it wasn’t the advent of mechanized fishing in the late 19th and 20th centuries that emptied the oceans of many of their native creatures.
Instead, human-caused changes came much earlier than previously thought, finds an extensive effort by marine historians to reconstruct the seas’ past life. “Fishing on a large scale happened much earlier than we’d thought previously and with significantly more impact than one would have thought 10 years ago,” says Poul Holm, professor at Trinity College, Dublin, and chairman of the History of Marine Animal Population project.
Researchers presented their findings at the Oceans Past II Conference in Vancouver, Canada, over the weekend:
•The first evidence of human effects on fish, shellfish and marine mammals began in the Middle Stone Age, 300,000 to 30,000 years ago. That’s 10 times earlier than previously believed.
•By the 11th century some of Europe’s major river systems were already fished out.
•Ocean fish populations began to crash in the 1500s when new fishing boats and equipment made deep-sea fishing possible.
The scientists and historians used ship logs, literary texts, tax accounts and newly translated legal documents to envision the oceans’ history.
Some species have recovered, including sea otters of western North America, elephant seals off the coast of Baja California, and Pacific gray whales. “These species will come back if we give them time and space, and the seas could be teeming with life again,” says conference chairman Andy Rosenberg of the University of New Hampshire.
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/environment/2009-05-25-oldfish_N.htm?csp=34
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More on Primitive Humans Conquered Sea, Surprising Finds Suggest E-mail
February, 18 2010
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National Geographic
Prehistoric axes found on a Greek island show that seafaring existed in the Mediterranean long before the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe.
Prehistoric hand ax found on Crete.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
Two years ago a team of U.S. and Greek archaeologists were combing a gorge on the island of Crete in Greece, hoping to find tiny stone tools employed by seafaring people who had plied nearby waters some 11,000 years ago.
Instead, Boston University archaeologist and stone-tool expert Curtis Runnels came across a whopping surprise- a sturdy 5-inch-long (13-centimeter-long) hand ax.
Knapped from a cobble of local quartz stone, the rough-looking tool resembled hand axes discovered in Africa and mainland Europe and used by human ancestors until about 175,000 years ago. This stone tool technology, useful for smashing bones, cutting flesh, and scraping hides, had been relatively static for over a million years.
Crete has been surrounded by vast stretches of sea for some five million years. The discovery of the hand ax suggests that someone besides technologically modern humans- perhaps Neanderthals, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, or primitive Homo sapiens- island-hopped across the Mediterranean for tens of millennia.
It’s been thought that the early humans of this time period were not capable of devising boats or even simple rafts- technology considered an expression of modern behavior. Homo sapiens practicing modern behaviors, such as wearing jewelry and making art didn’ t begin to appear until around a hundred thousand years ago.
But the new discoveries hint that these human ancestors were capable of much more sophisticated planning, cooperation, and construction- in this case, boatbuilding- than their simple stone tools would suggest.
“I was flabbergasted,” Runnels said. “The idea of finding tools from this very early time period on Crete was about as believable as finding an iPod in King Tut’s tomb.”
Even so, as researchers from the Directorate of Paleoanthropology and Speleology of South Greece and four U.S. universities combed the island, evidence of this unlikely journey kept mounting.
The team found more than 30 hand axes, as well as other stone tools of similar vintage, embedded into sediments at nine different locations on the southwestern coast of Crete near the town of Plakias. It looked to the team as if the artifacts had possibly eroded out from caves in the sea cliffs, and later had become incorporated into ancient beach deposits. Over time, geological processes lifted these ancient beaches up and away from the shore, forming natural terraces.
The stone tools themselves cannot be dated. Radiocarbon dating experts, however, have pinpointed the youngest of the sediments at the ancient beach locations associated with the hand axes to at least 45,000 years ago and geologists and soil scientists dated the oldest to at least 130,000 years ago.
Early Humans “Not Lost at Sea”?
The dating of the sites has convinced project leader Thomas Strasser, an archaeologist at Rhode Island’s Providence College, that early humans were voyaging across the Mediterranean tens of millennia earlier than believed.
“These early people were intentional seafarers,” he emphasized, “not individuals lost at sea.”
How long was their sea journey? It depends when they traveled and where they came from.
Maps of the coastal shelves suggest that even when the Mediterranean reached its lowest known point, plummeting some 440 feet (144 meters) below current sea level, people leaving from Turkey or Greece would have had to make three separate water crossings ranging from 12 to 24 miles (19 to 39 kilometers) each to reach Crete. If, on the other hand, the seafarers departed from Africa, they would have voyaged over 125 miles (200 kilometers) of open water.
“The fact that we have several hundred stone tools in nine different locations suggests that a large enough number of people came in order to sustain the populations and leave a visible archaeological trace,” Runnels said. “That means they didn’t just raft over once.”
Stirring Debate
The new finds, which will be published in June in Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, could rock many archaeological boats.
Researchers have long theorized, for example, that ancient human migrants from Africa- such as Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis- departed the continent on foot, trekking eastward through the Sinai Peninsula and then across the Middle East.
But the finds on Crete open an entirely new possibility. “Mediterranean islands like Crete have never been searched for Paleolithic evidence,” Runnels stated, “so people need to look there now.”
Moreover, the discovery could spark a host of other scientific debates.
If ancient humans were crossing the Mediterranean, Runnels said, then they certainly could have crossed other water barriers, such as the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden. “And that means that the assumptions that we have had- that the peopling of Eurasia was done by early hominins moving overland through the Near East, into India and down- will have to be revisited.” Hominins, or hominids, are members of humankind’s ancestral lineage.
Not surprisingly, the new research in Crete is already stirring debate.
Geoff Bailey, an archaeologist at York University in England and an expert on ancient coastal migrations, calls the idea of such ancient sea crossings “plausible.” But he thinks the team needs to find and conduct excavations at sites where ancient humans were actually making and using the stone tools.
“At the moment” Bailey said, “the dating is very vague.”
Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist who has worked extensively in Greece, accepts the team’s identification of the quartz artifacts as hand axes, but she wants to see other lines of evidence for the dates.
“The team has made a very good start,” said Harvati, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “But I think there needs to be a lot more work on dating the sites to really securely place the artifacts into a chronological context.”
More Evidence of Ancient Seafaring
At present, the earliest widely accepted evidence of ancient seafaring comes from Australia.
To reach the southern continent from the Southeast Asian mainland some 50,000 years ago, modern humans had to cross a 600-mile-long (970-kilometer-long) band of islands and at least ten ocean straits. The largest of these straits spanned 44 miles (71 kilometers) of open water- a gap that no large-bodied animal had ever managed to cross before Homo sapiens. To undertake such a lengthy crossing, human seafarers likely lashed together bamboo to make a simple watercraft.
Other pieces of evidence, however, suggest that seafaring could go back much deeper in time.
The discovery of human remains and stone tools in Spain dating to over a million years ago may indicate that some ancient hominin navigated the hazardous Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco, a journey of less than 12 miles (19 kilometers).
Moreover, Michael Morwood, an archaeologist at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, has long proposed that Homo erectus voyaged from the Indonesian island of Bali to nearby Flores, where excavations have revealed 700,000- to 800,000-year-old stone tools.
If additional work confirms that the earliest stone tools on Crete date to more than 130,000 years ago, archaeologists may want to take a closer look at these hypotheses.
One solid bet is that archaeologists will be giving more thought in years to come to the question of why early humans chose to venture out on the sea in the first place.
In the case of Crete, said Strasser’s team member Eleni Panagopoulou, an archaeologist at the Directorate of Paleoanthropology and Speleology of South Greece, seafarers may have craved new territory or new marine resources such as shellfish beds.
At the heart of it all, though, Panagopoulou suspects, was something fundamental to all human beings: “I think they were mainly motivated by curiosity,” she said, “and the desire for exploration.”
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