Fishing – One Of Our Oldest Sports But Once Used Only For Getting Food

Next time you drop a line in the water off the side of a ship supplied with the most recent sonar devices, dig into the cooler beside your feet for a favourite libation and kick your feet up to enjoy a calming day of fishing.

Fishing is one of the oldest activities known to man. Archaeologists have found ancient dumps of shell and bone, cave paintings depicting fishing and even hooks made from bone. There is even a theory that states we might be closer to the fish we try and catch than we think. The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis contends that human beings spent a time living by and catching their food from the shallows of lakes and oceans. The controversial theory contends years of living that helped us to look different from the apes and chimpanzees thought by some to be our ancestors because of this time evolving by water.

The ancient river Nile was an anglers paradise. The Egyptians relied on fresh and dried fish as a staple in their diets, and the various methods they used have been well represented in many ancient representations from their lives. Although they had some tools like nets, baskets and even hooks and lines, the fish caught were often clubbed to death. Perch, catfish and eels were among the most important catches in the Egyptian times.

The other bed of civilization, Greece, failed to share Egypt’s love of fishing. Still, there’s an outline on a wine cup from five hundred BC that shows a boy kneeling over a stream with a live capture net in the water below him. It’s confusing why the boy was ‘fishing’ however, since the device is obviously for live capture. There is also proof the Romans fished with nets and tridents off the sides of boats. One of their most famed Gods, Neptune, is outlined generally with a fishing trident. There are references to fishing in the Bible, too.

Maybe the most recognizable tool for fishing is the hook. No-one knows for certain, but it is quite likely prehistoric man was using some form of a hook over forty thousand years back. Gurus have had a little issues pinning down actual dates since they know the majority of the materials used back then were most likely wood and not awfully sturdy. English Isle anglers catch fish with hooks made of the hawthorn bush, right up to the present day.

Though Stone Age man had the tools required for making bone hooks, it is tricky for scientists to get precise dates since bone doesn’t define its age well. The oldest known hooks have turned up in Czechoslovakia, but others have turned up in Egypt and Palestine. The Palestinian hooks are said to be over nine thousand years of age, proving that fishing has been about for a particularly long time indeed.

Indians on Easter Island made their hooks from a gruesome material. Since human sacrifices were abundant in the area for some time, the natives made their fish hooks out of the most plentiful material around ” human bone. Fish hooks made of human bone were the norm there until missionaries arrived at the turn of the last century. In addition to hooks made of stone, bone or wood, ancient man often combined material to make composite hooks with barbs that kept the bait on.

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