People have fished for thousands and thousands of years: there is abundant evidence for that. The Mesolithic, for instance, is defined entirely in some regions by towering shell middens, recording generations of marine exploitation. Harpoon technology, the primary method of catching fish (other than using your bare hands), have been around for at least 90,000 years, the earliest known found at Semliki in the DRC, produced by the distant ancestors of the Efé pygmies. The age of deep-water fishing, on the other hand - the act of setting offshore for deeper waters, catching larger prey and marine mammals such as whales, sharks and dolphins - is more controversial, because the technology required for it would have direct implications regarding the complexity of their culture and society.
How can archaeologists tell? The easiest piece of the puzzle to find are the remains of deep-water marine species within shell middens, species which are not known today to venture near the shore. More enigmatic are depictions of deep-water species on rock surfaces, wood and bone, and murkiest of all are the fragments of naval craft in deep-water environments, where it is almost impossible to tell whether the site is in situ or not.
Looking back to the depths of prehistory, deep-water fishing, if it occurred at all during the Palaeolithic, would have been accidental. There is no evidence - at least so far - of a direct intention to fish for oceanic species. Coastal and river fishing was an important part of life, although Abri du Poisson, in the Dordogne, is about the only parietal depiction of a fish. Mobile, portable images of fish do exist from the Aurignacian (45,000 BP) onwards. Sometimes, nature provided them with deep-sea gifts. Whale bones, from beached sperm whales, were traded extensively from Spain to France during the Magdalenian (15,000 BP).
The capability to fish in deeper waters certainty did exist, however; it may have become a necessity during the 11,000 BP voyage to Ireland, from north-western France to Gwendoline Cave in county Kerry, and during the ~30,000 BP voyage from Taiwan (then joined to China) to the Ryukyu archipelago. On the whole, as there was an abundance of food sources from the land and coasts, deep-water fishing would not have been actively sought out.
After the last glacial period, several rapid rises in sea levels, and the extinction of large megafauna following the disappearance of their steppe habitat, forced human societies in Europe, Africa and elsewhere into a predominately maritime cycle of subsistence. Estuaries, rivers and lakes were the primary early Mesolithic haunts, although large land mammals still made up an important slice of the diet. Deep-water fishing may have started then, inspired by the occasional beaching of whales, sharks and dolphins. Shark bones were in fact recovered from Yderhede, an Ertebølle Culture site in northern Jutland, dating back to between 7,200 and 6,800 BP, when Denmark was mostly submerged by an extension of the North Sea called the Littorina Sea. On the island of Teviec, a double burial contained a vertebrae from a large deep-ocean whale, as well as teeth from a smaller whale species and a seal.
These are rare examples, and they could earnestly be explained as bones recovered from the beach. It is possible though that their inclusion was influenced by deep-water events; the inundation of Doggerland might have attracted marine mammal species from the scent of decaying drowned animals and floating plant matter. No sign of ocean fishing. All that can be said it that Mesolithic peoples were aware of the deep ocean, and attached a special, even spiritual, significance to it.
Fast forward to the Neolithic, and there is one glaring symbol evocative of ocean-going voyages: depictions of whales. Several are known from menhirs and dolmens in Brittany (i.e., Mané Lud) and western Hispania, some more schematic than others, which may reflect a second or third-hand conception of whales rather than from direct experience. The rock art depicting the humpback or sperm whales is significant, as the animals rarely search for feeding or mating grounds close to the European coast, preferring to cruise up and down the north Atlantic currents. It is also notable that the primary range of the humpback whale (where they spend most of their time) does not extend further than the Galician coast, while the opposite is true for sperm whales. The idea to hunt for and record whale sightings might therefore have come about independently. Alternatively, if Neolithic fishers were able to traverse deep ocean and dive underwater to depict whales accurately, then it is not a stretch to imagine that communities around the Bay of Biscay and those of Hispania hunted them, and made contact with each other on the open sea on a semi-regular basis.
So can we pin a date on the first time a hunter-gather or farmer group fished on the deep ocean, miles or hundreds of miles from the shore? Tuna may have been hunted offshore at Franchthi Cave, Greece, dating to the 10th and 9th millennia BP, although this could have been achieved within sight of land, the same as many other sites where oceanic species have been found. Orcas, a classic monster of the deep sea, are known to have been hunted in Mesolithic Denmark, but again orcas also occasionally inhabit coastal environments and, very rarely, swim upstream into rivers.
To find the first definitive instance of pelagic (deep-sea) exploitation, we need to move forward to Chalcolithic / Bell-Beaker Portugal, at about 2300 BCE. Inside a chambered tomb known as the Praia das Maçãs, buttons, ornaments and cylinders were found to be made of sperm whale ivory, a species which exclusively haunts pelagic environments. The fine craftsmanship of the ornaments shows that the carver was aware of the properties, and the special nature of, whale ivory, as opposed to elephant ivory. Fragments of sperm whale ivory are also known from several other Neolithic and Bell Beaker sites in the area, so there was evidently an established knowledge about them.
Although processing a beached whale can't absolutely be ruled out, sperm whale beaching may be more common today than it was in prehistory, due to intensive sonar use by ships and recent solar maximums. Given that Thule / Inuit marine hunters were able to kill and bring back killer whales with only rudimentary harpoon and watercraft technology, it would not have been impossible for Neolithic and Chalcolithic fishers to do the same.
References:
Cassen, S., Rodríguez-Rellán, C. et al (2019). Real and ideal European maritime transfers along the Atlantic coast during the Neolithic. Documenta Praehistorica, (XLVI), 308-325.
Lefebvre, A., Marín-Arroyo, A. B., et al (2021). Interconnected Magdalenian societies as revealed by the circulation of whale bone artefacts in the Pyreneo-Cantabrian region. Quaternary Science Reviews, 251, 106692.
Pickard, C., & Bonsall, C. (2004). Deep-sea fishing in the European Mesolithic: fact or fantasy?. European Journal of Archaeology, 7(3), 273-290.
Whittle, A. (2000). ‘Very Like a Whale’: Menhirs, Motifs and Myths in the Mesolithic–Neolithic Transition of Northwest Europe. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 10(2), 243-259.
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