14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists carrying out digs inside an Australian cave were able to discover a series of bones belonging to tuna and sharks, which were taken into this shelter by human hands. The finding indicates that the practice of fishing is at least 42,000 years old.
Archaeologists are convinced that the bones did not get to their current location by other mechanisms, such as floods. At the same time, it is known that the cave in question was never submerged. The latter scenario could have easily explained the finding.
The finding was made in an island located a little to the north from Australia. Dating techniques established that the bone remnants are at least 42,000 years old. What this implies is that fishing may have supported the spread of this particular population far and wide.
Details of the investigation appear in the November 24 online issue of the top journal Science. It provides the first evidence that deep-sea fishing was an established practice all those millennia ago.
If people at the time had this ability, then they most definitely would have been able to move across the seas to colonize other regions. Populations that were only capable of fishing near the shoreline would have remained confined to a certain island or continent, without the possibility of spreading.
The discovery is all the more important when considering that the earliest known boats – remnants of which were discovered in France and the Netherlands – are as little as 10,000 years old. But, even when this discovery was made, researchers did not fully trust it.
The reason for their mistrust was that wood and similar light-weight materials do not preserve well in the geological record. Seeing how these would have been the materials of choice when it came to constructing boats, researchers expected not to find artifacts of this type that were very old.
Additionally, settling Australia and Southeast Asia would have been impossible without boats. Sea crossings are very common, measuring an average of 30 kilometers. Crossing these expanses with women and children would have been impossible. Unless boats were involved.
Interestingly, Florida Museum of Natural History anthropologist William Keegan points out that the tuna found in the cave were only 50 to 70 centimeters in length. This implies that they were juvenile, therefore easier to capture along coastlines.
This issue is far from being settled, investigators agree, but at least the new study contributes an interesting possibility to our species' spread throughout the world, ScienceNow reports.