Stone Age People Hooked Eels Like Modern Fishermen

Archaeologists in southern Denmark have found evidence showing that Stone Age people fished eels much like modern people, using three-pronged spears with a center point for spearing fish.

The clue, a fragmented fishing spear, known as a leister, was unearthed during an archaeological survey for the construction of the Femern Belt link, an immersed tunnel that will connect the German island of Fehmarn with the Danish island of Lolland.

"It was found obliquely embedded in the seafloor and must have been lost during fishing at some point in the Neolithic," Line Marie Olesen, archaeologist at the Museum Lolland-Falster, told Discovery News.

"The finding is remarkable as it shows both lateral prongs in doubtless association with a central bone point," she added.

The association between lateral prongs and bone point has long been presumed, but until now was never documented.

"In the past only a large number of individual leister prongs and bone points was found," Søren Anker Sørensen, an archaeologist specializing in mesolithic research, said.

A relatively well preserved spear, where parts of both of the lateral prongs had been preserved along with a piece of the shaft to which it was tied, was first discovered on the Danish Baltic Sea island of Ærø by diving amateur archaeologists some 40 years ago. But the piece did not have a centered point, as in modern spears.

Thus archaeologists have long wondered whether prehistoric fishing spears could work without such a point.

The new find provided the answer. Although the string winding and the shaft were missing, the position of spear's prongs and bone point in relation to each other indicated they belonged to the same spear that had broken off.

"It tells us, that in some cases at least, the leisters were equipped with a bone point much like present day eel leisters, which implies that the fishing of eel in that respect has not changed much," Olesen said.

Olesen and colleagues are now trying to precisely date the fishing tool.

"We have not yet obtained a radio carbon date of the leister. It could be middle Neolithic or late Neolithic alike and maybe even younger. From one of the other sites in the lagoon we have an individual leister prong, which is dated to the late Neolithic," Olesen said.

In the Late Stone Age, the area east of present-day Rødbyhavn where the fishing tool was found, featured two lagoons, and a 65-foot-wide belt of stones scattered in a layer of sand and gravel along the coast.

"The stone belt is actually the old coast, where it was to be found at approximately 3000 B.C.," Olesen said.

Immediately south of the stones, the archaeologists found a wattle fence which originated from one of the fixed gill nets on stakes that Stone Age fishermen set up close to the coast.

Stretching across about 82 feet and forming a U that opened towards the lagoon, the wattle fence

"Whether the gill net was originally placed on the site, or whether it had washed in from the sea or been brought in for repairs or maintenance is still uncertain," Olesen said.

According to the archaeologists, the relatively complex structure might indicate that its function was different from the more crude fishing weirs that are known in the area.

Last year the excavation work at the site yielded 5,000-year-old footprints alongside a system of fishing weirs, revealing how Stone Age people made strenuous attempts to cope with the destructive forces of the sea.

Read more at Discovery News