Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

14 INTRODUCTIONSince it is impossible to iix the length of time, if any, whichseparates the New Stone from the Copper Age, we can makeno adequate guess as to how many generations of men and howmany centuries of time were needed to transform the bentinto the barbed hook. Perhaps ^Eneolithic experts can.Extant examples from Egypt of both furnish, however,some chronological data. If the argument from silence, orrather from non-survival in one particular country, be notpressed unduly, these tend to prove that so far from their beingtwin brethren, the birth of the bent anteceded that of thebarbed hook by at any rate the number of years which separatedthe 1st from the XVIIIth Dynasty, before which the occurrenceof a barbed hook is rare.The first implement of fishing, be it what you please, wasno spht-cane Rod, nor the " town-like Net " of Oppian, butsome simple device created by the insistent necessity of procuringfood. With our primitive ancestors, as with the companionsof Menelaus, often " was hunger gnawing at theirbellies," a hunger accentuated at one period by the retreatfurther into the primeval forestsor at another by the actualdecrease of the animals, which had hitherto furnished thestaple of Man's sustenance.Fortunately other data more ancient and more authoritativethan the Egyptian or Sumerian as to priority ofimplement help the quest of Archaeologists.Blazing their trail backwards in the half-hght of nonhistoricalforests, they hap on many a cache of ancient devicesin the settlements of the New Stone Man, Pausing merely toexamine these, they cut their way through yet denser anddarker timber, until eventually they emerge at an openingwherein once stood the ultimate ifscarcely the original storehouse,whence Neolithic Man drew and in the course of longtravel bettered his materials—the dwelling place of the OldStone Man.To this store-house we too must press, tarrying only atthe caches to note cursorily Neohthic betterment or invention.The dwelUng place is one of many mansions, or rather of manyrude caverns dotted over Europe.