Professor Sue O’Connor from Australian National University has uncovered the world’s oldest evidence of deep sea fishing at a site in East Timor.
The world’s oldest fish hook (Sue O'Connor)
The finds from the Jerimalai cave site, including the world’s earliest recorded fish hook, demonstrate that 42,000 years ago our ancestors had high-level maritime skills and were expert at catching the types of fish that would be challenging even today – fish like tuna. The results of her work are published in the latest issue of Science.
“The site that we studied featured more than 38,000 fish bones from 2,843 individual fish dating back 42,000 years,” said Professor O’Connor. “What the site in East Timor has shown us is that early modern humans in Island Southeast Asia had amazingly advanced maritime skills”.
“We found a fish hook, made from a shell, which dates to between 23,000 and 16,000 years ago. This is, we believe, the earliest known example of a fish hook and shows that our ancestors were skilled crafts people as well as fishers. The hooks don’t seem suitable for pelagic fishing, but it is possible that other types of hooks were being made at the same time”.
What’s still unknown is how these ancient people were able to catch these fast-moving deep-ocean fish.
“It’s not clear what method the occupants of Jerimalai used to capture the pelagic fish or even the shallow water species. But tuna can be caught in purse seines or leader nets, or by using hooks and trolling. Simple fish aggregating devices such as tethered logs can also be used to attract them. So they may have been caught using hooks or nets. Either way it seems certain that these people were using quite sophisticated technology and watercraft to fish offshore,” said Professor O’Connor.
