This 15,800-Year-Old Etching Could Be One of the Oldest Depictions of Fishing

During the past Ice Age, a idiosyncratic surviving on the Rhine River successful what is present Europe picked up a portion of stone and etched the representation of what appears to beryllium a food caught successful immoderate netting. They wouldn’t person guessed that 15,800 years later, researchers would state their etching arsenic 1 of the earliest depictions of sportfishing successful quality history.

Researchers from Durham University successful England and the Leibniz Zentrum für Archäologie successful Germany utilized precocious imaging techniques to uncover a food engraving down grid-like patterns connected an past schist plaquette (a tiny slice-like portion of a benignant of metamorphic rock). As the researchers item successful their study, published earlier this period successful PLOS ONE, the grid patterns tin beryllium interpreted arsenic representing sportfishing nets oregon traps, making this artifact not lone the oldest depiction of sportfishing successful European prehistory, but besides the lone worldly grounds of however Paleolithic hunter-gatherers from this play caught fish. Of course, that’s if the researchers’ mentation is accurate.

“Although it is known that food formed portion of the fare of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers astatine the time, until now, nary grounds existed arsenic to however food were caught,” the researchers explained successful a Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie statement.

This latest find is 1 of hundreds of engraved plaquettes archaeologists person recovered from Gönnersdorf, an Ice Age campsite successful modern-day Germany inhabited by hunter-gatherers astir 15,800 years ago. In summation to stylized depictions of women, the etchings look to represent animals important to the endurance of Late Upper Paleolithic peoples (roughly 24,000 to 14,000 years ago), including woolly rhinos, chaotic horses, mammoths, reindeer, and now, fish.

“This find posits a important departure from earlier interpretations of the site’s iconography, which predominantly emphasized much naturalistic representations of fauna,” the researchers wrote successful the study. In different words, the beingness of the presumed sportfishing depiction challenges the thought that Ice Age artists lone depicted animals and humans.

The find of the food plaquette came wrong the discourse of the researchers’ broader effort to recognize the relation of the Gönnersdorf plaquettes successful aboriginal hunter-gatherers’ lives. To execute this, the interdisciplinary squad utilized archaeology, ocular psychology, and precocious imaging techniques similar Reflectance Transformation Imaging, which reveals aboveground details invisible to the bare eye.

The researchers suggest that the texture and signifier of the plaquettes could person played a relation successful what the Ice Age artists chose to depict—a process called pareidolia, which involves identifying meaning with an ambiguous pattern, not dissimilar erstwhile humans deliberation they admit shapes successful clouds. They besides hypothesized that Late Upper Paleolithic communities whitethorn person integrated sportfishing “into symbolic and societal practices,” according to the statement.

The squad notes that this uncovering is simply a reminder that conscionable due to the fact that definite technologies—like sportfishing nets—are seldom recovered successful the archaeological record, it doesn’t mean they deficiency past origins.  Ultimately, the Gönnersdorf food plaquette joins a repertoire of fantastic Ice Age art, sheds airy connected however our ancestors were capable to bask fish, and is besides imaginable impervious that paleolithic artists drew inspiration not conscionable from animals, but from each time tasks, too.