Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
isn't that a common question?
"How do fish appear in landlocked lakes/ponds/etc"?
After digging a pond and letting it fill with rainwater/groundwater, fish appear. I don't think its because people carried them there.
(don't really know the common answer though)
So if you wanted to gather plant food how do you make sure that the food you find is edible?
It's quite simple. If you know a plant is edible you take the seeds and you carry them with you and broadcast them all over the place.
The interesting part about this is that this is also a form of selective breeding, since you're choosing the edible plants over the inedible plants.
Note that you do not tend to the plants or do any form of agriculture, you're still foraging from random plants you encounter.
And yet despite that it can quite happily plan out and navigate a route that is hundreds of miles long, at roughly 20 times the speed it was designed to travel at.
I'm sitting here writing a text message to someone 1800 miles away giving them directions to a shop in Vienna and I can visualise where they need to go for that to all work, with a brain that evolved to think about "not the next hill but the one after that" distance.
The artifact can be buried by colluvial(gravity driven), or alluvial(water driven) deposition before they have a chance to decay. For more information you can consult a geomorphologist, which I am not.
They're often so well-preserved that not only can you clearly see the markings on the bark but you can sometimes make out the rings in the wood.
I remember my dad pulling out a piece that was so well preserved you could see where deer had gnawed it.
Your eggs won't hatch until they're well away from your relatives.
I will add new genetics to the line soon, for what it's worth. It isn't an experiment to see what will happen. In most cases I never expected them to breed to begin with.
The animals dropped tend to be fish or frogs.
It has lots of amphibians and snakes. Rarely any birds.
Snakes are active but I doubt they eat nearly as much as the bullfrogs.
Could also introduce fish that will eat the frogs to keep them under control. Or just leave it all as-is.
There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places.
Alpine lakes are fed by snow met. There’s not going to be fish eggs on the snowpack that melts into the lake.
> There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places.
Do you realize that in the summer mountains below 4000m are mostly snow-free and thawing point ie in Europe has been pushed above 5000m repeatedly during summers. Its easy to have 25C in 2500m in today's alps (ie today 22C in 2000m in Chamonix, France).
The term 'alpine lake' doesn't mean anything specific, and most are fed from rain during entire summer without any/much of snow or ice contribution.
If hunter gatherers did it 7000 years ago, should be possible to suspect it, but modern people do this things all the time. It should be easier to prove at least that they not were released in, lets say, 1780.
But I always thought the explanation was eggs randomly getting stuck to bird feet. Or maybe a bird carries a fish with eggs up there and eats it or something. Inevitably it happens though...
- Dr. Ian Malcolm
Is it unbelievable that ancient hunter-gatherers would do the same thing?
This looks like a good overview paper for interested folk: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3048989/
Many do have rivers; many don't. Ponds even more so don't have attached rivers.
You can even see their scheduled fish plantings online:
Apparently some fish species do have small sticky eggs that can stick to the legs of water fowl, or even (with very small probability) pass through them intact, so this seems much more likely. Maybe a group of ducks feeding in one place then flying off to another?
It just needs to be one pregnant fish. (or many eggs)
There are many internal or quasi-internal fertilization oviparous species.
And, in sharks at least, ovoviviparous and even placental species
I see Texas multiple times and Norway zero times. What is the confusion causing your question?
https://www.raptorresource.org/2021/01/22/racheting-raptor-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals
> Tornadoes and waterspouts may lift up animals into the air and deposit them miles away.
By full, that means not being able to see the bottom of the river due to the amount of eels present.
We ate them all.
The eels made it all the way to the Sargasso Sea and back, for breeding purposes. Clearly they would not be able to get from the sea to a fully landlocked lake, with no route to the sea.
However, my point is that we had so much marine life before we cleared out the rivers, to then need the sea, to go from coastal waters to the depths of the Antarctic ocean in the quest for any fish that have survived previous quests. It is just hard for us to imagine the abundance there once was, and, therefore, the relative ease to populate an isolated alpine meadow lake with fish in former times.
Humans have decimated Earth's abundance.
In 1873, French novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote that if every egg reached maturity, within three years “you could walk across the Atlantic dryshod on the backs of cod.” In 1885, the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture said it was not only impossible to exhaust the cod supply, but even to make a noticeable dent in it. “Unless the order of nature is overthrown, for centuries to come our fisheries will continue to be fertile,” the ministry declared.
Humans find a way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
Maybe an explanation, even a decent one, but not the only possible, not by a mile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals
This is one of the biggest problems with science. Lack of imagination an partially cooked theories written as gods speak and engraved in marble forever. Is true than being selectively blind may be a requisite in the stupid publish or perish race rat.
Trouts are stubborn fishes, able to jump. If the idea is that lakes created thousand years ago, never had a hidden sink connecting karst systems, a temporary river or a specially big detaw flood that trouts could use... okay, prove it.
Only among people who've never looked into it. Generally it happens because birds drop them and also birds occasionally get fish eggs stuck to them and move them around.
The answer is that their eggs are extremely lightweight, so much so that wind can carry them long distances. Their entire life cycle is extremely accelerated. Once water soaks the eggs the critters can hatch, develop, and lay new eggs in a matter of days. The newly laid eggs have a tiny chance of reaching a new seasonal pool area.
Charles Fort collected numerous data for his famous "The Book of the Damned" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Damned
> As well as living matter, inorganic substances also crash to earth, including seeds, stones and sand. However, these pale in comparison to the mighty ice blocks. January 2000 saw several chunks weighing up to four kilograms each fall on Spain, but they're dwarfed by the 200kg titans that struck Brazil in 1995.
Wat. Does anyone have a reference for the Brazil one? Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacryometeor ) mentions nothing. Megacryometeors: Distribution on Earth and Current Research (2006)[0] says:
> In Campinas and Itapira, Brazil, two huge megacryometeors of 50 and 200 kg fell in 1997; the atmosphericisotopic signature of both specimens wasunequivocally confirmed (8). Finally, on 21 July 2004, a huge mass of ice weighingapproximately 400 kg fell very close to a 15-year-old girl in Toledo, Spain.
400kg! Unfortunately, no reference is given for this one and for the one in Brazil they refer to https://cepagri.unicamp.br/gelo/gelo.html, which – like many other of their references – produces a 404 nowadays. And, of course, the page hasn't gotten preserved by the Internet Archive, either. :(
[0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4315744 , PDF download available on https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6561843_Megacryomet...
* Accidental human seeding. Rather than bringing a full grown fish up to a lake, is it possible that the eggs could have been in waterskins/containers and when the humans refilled them, the eggs washed out?
* What about eels? Eels can travel across land in damp conditions (and Norway is damp much of the time). Could they take other fish eggs with them?
If you go there, you're free to fish to your heart's content.
Crater Lake is a pretty special lake: It was formed purely from rainwater into a crater over the last 7000 years. It is still the clearest lake in the world.
With fish, however, came a whole ecosystem. When fish die they decompose. I don't know the details, but the whole process is leading the lake to be less and less clear.
(Some people also consider it the bluest lake in the world, but that title tends to be disputed).
Just checked again and it seems you need to release any bull trout caught there, as they are now endangered. Pity.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/special-delivery-d...
They've jumped to conclusions.
I hate how much of historical science is performed this way. Speculation is not very scientific.
https://www.khm.uio.no/english/about/organisation/archaeolog...
To be fair, Gemini says there are no presumed cases of specifically brown trout populating an isolated water body by means other than human stocking. For other types of fish, maybe (eggs stick to bird legs, or one gets pooped out intact), but for brown trout, no! The eggs only survive in cold water, not inside a bird, are relatively large and non-sticky.
To survive a long schlepp up a mountain in a waterskin, it would presumably have been fertilized eggs that were transported (can be found in river gravel) since they have low oxygen needs. According to Gemini even baby fish might only survive a couple of hours, but eggs (if kept in cold water) could survive days or weeks, and obviously would be more practical to transport a sufficient number to have a decent chance of establishing a breeding colony.
Interesting stuff, but maybe better considered as reconstructive history than science.
7000 years ago is the edge of recorded human civilization
(well 8000 years, I remember this because it's also the edge of a gamma ray burst in light years that could destroy all life on earth after traveling all that time)
Hunter-gatherers aren't known for their civilizations.
Also I believe that Urban society is needed just to give enough people enough leisure time to sit and think of things like this. Hunter gathers can learn to read/write, but to figure it out they couldn't do.
The earliest pre-pottery Neolithic complexes are nearly 4000 years older than that.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330759548_World's_F...
so they each have different timelines/landmarks
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_of_civilization
> The concept of a cradle of civilization has a focus where the inhabitants came to build cities, to create writing systems, to experiment in techniques for making pottery and using metals, to domesticate animals, and to develop complex social structures involving class systems
> Today, scholarship generally identifies six areas where civilization emerged independently: the Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia and the Levant; the Nile Valley in Northeast Africa; the Indo-Gangetic Plain; the North China Plain; the Andean Coast; and the Mesoamerican Gulf Coast
It's not because of agriculture. They have agriculture (they grow maniok, and you don't need much. They have fire, weapons, ... Also the entire countryside is full of grain). It's not that they don't understand how things work. They just don't care.
It's not because they're dumb. In fact on pretty much all measures the humans living in those villages are better, in a genetic sense, than we are. They're smarter. They're more beautiful. Every last one is in shape, even the oldest (the oldest, btw, are maybe 45, not that they even know themselves. In both villages I saw the oldest was a couple). They're even better, genetically, than the black people living in cities around them. They have no sick (maybe 1), because the sick are dead. Even sick children regularly die. They bury their dead, with respect, after a burial but to say they have a religion is overstating matters. They have noone that can't run a marathon, or is fat, or ... because if you can't hunt you don't eat. Wounds are deadly. Not because the wound is so serious, but because you're nearly guaranteed to develop fever and die. Most people die from complications with infections. They have only beautiful men and women, because if you can't participate in "evening activities" you'll go hungry or get murdered (and it's not just men: women have lovers kill other men due to "insults", or they poison someone. And regularly it doesn't take much incentive at all for a murder to happen). Sometimes they (try to) treat cities the way the treat neighboring tribes: they attack them to kill everyone (at the very least all men). That usually fails due to guns, but it's not like it never works.
There are very few people in those villages that want to leave. And they're not about to starve. There's no need for civilization, and, frankly, they don't want to. But also, I don't care what religion or non-religion you have: you will find that way of live thoroughly immoral.
I think the only people arguing that the North Sentinelese are immoral are religious, for instance (hence why most attempts to visit are done by missions). The general consensus is otherwise awe for being separated from the rest of us, relatively unmolested.
Because if you have civilization imperfect eyes are not a death sentence.
Because you can actually survive your 30s (odds > 1% or so) in civilization.
Because of music, movies, culture, science, ...
Oh and if you must have the more practical reason: because the priests come from the cities, usually a while after the city got brutally attacked with every man (and male child starting from ~puberty) from the village and even a few women trying to indiscriminately kill anyone they meet with spears and (before) poison and forcing everyone else to shoot at them, to devastating effect on both sides? Because such a priest sees the bodies, hears the stories of everyone "they'll try it again in 10 years", of mostly villagers but also a number of people that just happened to be in their way, and wonders if there's another way? Oh and, by the way, for this particular purpose, "our savior Jesus Christ" IS in fact another way and a solution, and that, of course, is how religions work.
Because "right of the strongest", brutally imposed through massacres and rape, is not in fact moral, I don't care what ideology or religion you subscribe to? Subsistence farming is a short, brutal way to live and this way of life dials that up to 11, or to 500, really.
I'm not sure why anyone would either not know this, or even insult it, as if the success of your ideology, of "natural purity" is somehow more important than kids surviving, and all the other reasons mentioned above, and I'm sure you can come up with 500 more.
People going to their island are not "immigrants" - no intention of remaining.
From what I hear, they kill any outsider within spear range.
So they are not, strictly speaking, "uncontacted" in the sense that they haven't had non-violent interactions with outsiders.
Thanks for teaching me something new. That doesn't happen every day!
Maybe we all are the North Sentinel Island of the Milky Way. Now there's a thought.
Certainly it would be accurate to say that both the cities in the neighborhood and the central government have issues with this sort of thing. To say nothing of when cities get attacked.
The answer is that they don't have a shared enemy in the form of an inhospitable environment like winter or the Egyptian desert.