People like to eat fish. In fact, the predilection for piscines predates humankind itself. There is thinking that archaic hominins in southeast Asia were eating shellfish and maybe a primordial Javan even scratched a zigzag on a clamshell half a million years ago. Almost 2 million years ago in Kenya, hominins were eating fish as well as turtle and crocodile. Even Homo erectus didn’t exist yet, let alone modern humans.
Fast-forwarding almost two million years and moving from the Koobi Fora Formation in Kenya to northern Israel, archaeologists have found a site that had apparently been devoted to fishing for around 10,000 years.
It doesn’t seem that anybody lived at this particular site on the shore of the paleo-lake Hula during this period from about 20,000 to 10,000 years ago if only because the water level of the lake kept rising and falling, and it was soggy. No evidence of settlement has been found. But plenty of evidence has been found that smacks of fishing, including unmistakable fishhooks made of bone, fish bones and a plethora of what could plausibly have been limestone net sinkers. Thus reports the team led by Prof. Gonen Sharon of Tel-Hai College in the Galilee, with colleagues from the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University, the University of Iceland, University of Tarragona and the University of Connecticut, in the journal of PaleoAnthropology.
Israel and the Levant are dotted with sites from the Epipaleolithic, the transitional time between the peak of the Ice Age to the tentative start of settlement and farming in the Neolithic. Most other Epipaleolithic sites are marked by constant occupation, the team writes. But rarely do they “document” such a long period almost the entire Epipaleolithic. Some even show signs of housing: evidence of huts were found in hunter-gatherer settlements by the Sea of Galilee from 23,000 years ago and northern Jordan from 20,000 years ago, signs of settlement predating agriculture.
Jordan River Dureijat is unique in being a site in which the prehistoric people didn’t live but did apparently use for a specific activity: exploiting aquatic and semi-aquatic resources such as mollusks, crabs, turtles and amphibians in the paleo-lake, the team concludes.
In other words, the Epipaleolithic was a turbulent time marked by climate change: rising temperatures and sea levels (though this site is inland, it bears adding). As the period transited into the Neolithic, there is even thinking that various skills such as agriculture developed independently in the Levant and Eurasia as the environment became more comfortable.
Science is still working on how the climate actually changed in this part of the world during the Epipaleolithic, Sharon clarifies. We know that global mean sea level rose as the ice sheets retreated and glaciers melted. But it isn’t clear how environmental conditions changed in the Levant.
We’re in a great place to tackle such questions, he says. We’re still checking what we found. But it’s clear that during these 10,000 years, we start as small bands of hunter-gatherers and end it as large complex communities a society based on an agricultural economy. Our site describes these two great processes, Sharon says, referring to the environmental and socioeconomic changes.
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