It was on the banks of the Rhine River. Thousands of years ago, in the Ice Age, it was a camp. Fishing representations from 15,800 years ago appeared there. They are the oldest about primitive fishing practices. New imaging methods allowed this. They are intricate engravings of fish on ancient shale plates, accompanied by grid-like patterns. They are interpreted as representations of fishing nets or traps.
Scientists from the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie and the University of Durham say so. This research not only deepens our understanding of Paleolithic diets. It also suggests that fishing may have had symbolic meaning in the Late Upper Paleolithic (about 20,000-14,500 years ago). The work is published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Eye-catching designs
It is a remarkable insight into the symbolic and social practices of early hunter-gatherer societies. The Ice Age camp of Gönnersdorf houses treasures. There are hundreds of small flat slabs of shale with engraved images of prey animals. It has wild horses, woolly rhinos, reindeer and mammoths.
Several hundred engravings of highly stylized human women brought him worldwide fame. Now the 15,800-year-old representations of fishing are also gaining notoriety.
The use of art in long-ago domestic environments was explored, LEIZA reported in a statement. They identified the individual artists and their particular “styles.” The shapes of the platelets and the patterns of ridges and cracks influenced the representation.
Art and prehistory
There are several intricate scenes of fish covered in grid-like patterns. They would be representations of fishing nets or traps. It is known that fish was part of the diet of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. But there was no evidence of how the fish were caught.
The Gönnersdorf images constitute the oldest known representations of fishing with nets or traps in European prehistory. They remind us that certain technologies may have much older roots than commonly assumed. Fishing had been integrated into symbolic and social practices. This expands the known repertoire of representations in Ice Age art. The practices, as well as the animals, were artistic subjects.
