Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

FISH Z)£-B7?/5—HUNTERS BEFORE FISHERS 25original and academic. Here is the sheer beginning, thespontaneous germ of art,the labourings of a savage soul controlledby wilful aesthetic emotions." 1This review of the fishing weapons and methods of theraces cited—especially of the Eskimos and the Tasmanians,the races closest to the Troglodytes — provides data whichmake for a plausible conjecture, but none, owing to differingconditions caused by climate or custom, which enable a definitedecision as to priority of implement.Let us return from this survey of races to the cavernes andexamine their contents. 2 Their debris (at times ten feet deepand seventy long) manifests that these stations served ashabitations for several generations of men.From nearly all the French stations neighbouring the seaor rivers, bones of fish, especially of salmon, have been recovered.These have been identified, but not without some dissent, asbelonging to the Tunny, Labrax lupus, Eel, Carp, Barbel,Trout, and Esox lucius.The presence of the last, our pike, in this (and again inNeolithic) debris excites our interest as evidence that theTroglodytes knew and made use of a fish whose absence,despite its wide geographical distribution, from all Greek andLatin literature until we reach the time of Ausonius, Cuvier,or more strictly Valenciennes, notes with extreme surprise. ^While in La Madelaine and elsewhere fish occur abundantlyin the debris, at some cavernes in the V^z^re Valley, notablyLe Moustier, they cannot be traced. Their absence coupledNviththe presence of animal bones has led some archaeologiststo the conclusion that Le Moustier and other stations wereearlier inhabited than La Madelaine, at a time, in fact, whenaccording to Paul Broca, " Man hunted the smaller animals as^ E. J. Banfield, Confessions of a Beachcomber, London, 1913.2 For descriptions of Palaeolithic life, see Worthington G. Smith, Man thePrimal Savage, London, 1894, and J. J. Atkinson, Primal Law, London, 1903.For the community assumed by the former, Atkinson substitutes a familygroup.* Cuvier and Valenciennes, Hist. Nat. des Poissons, vol. xviii. pp. 279-80,Paris, 1846. Since in this volume the geographical distribution of the pike,as known at the time, is set forth without any mention of Greece, it is ratherdifficult to understand the surprise of Valenciennes, who wrote the volume inquestion ; Cuvier died in 1832.