Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

38 INTRODUCTIONsuddenly appear likean inventive mutation, but very slowlyevolve as their usefulness is demonstrated by practice.The shaft is very rarely perforated at the base for theattachment of a line ^ ; it is cylindrical (later flat) in formadapted to the capture of large fish in streams. The harpoonsmay possibly have been projected by means of the so-calledpropulseiirs or dart throwers, which resemble the Eskimo andAustralian implements of to-day.Amidst the clash of opinion as to the exact use and methodof use of these weapons, my conclusion, admitttedly incapableof absolute proof, holds that the Palaeolithic fisherowes to thehunter the inception of the chief weapon of his equipment, theSpear-Harpoon.Paul Broca's dictum 2 that Man hunted before he fishedseems, perhaps, despite Ball's excavation of Eskimo debris,^to be borne out by Troglodyte records both positive andnegative. The Gorge or bait-holder was employed by thehunter (according to some) even earlier than by the fisher.Gorges have been from time immemorial and still are in voguein the Untersee for the capture of marine birds, as is the caseto-day with the Eskimos of Norton Sound.From the chronicles of Rau, H. Philips, and others can bebuilt a Table of Generations, or the story of how the HuntingSpear begat the Fishing Spear, which begat the Harpoonunilaterally barbed, which in turn begat the Harpoon bilaterallybarbed, until about the tenth or twentieth generation—one is appalled at the amount of Succession Duty which such^ H. J. Osborne {op. cit., p. 385 ff.) states that, with the exception of onehalf-finislaed hole in a Harpoon from La Madelaine, the side hole for theattachment of the thong to the Harpoon does not appear in the French MagdalenianHarpoon, although in those from Cantabria it is nearly always present.The Azilian weapon usually bears a hole,^ The Troglodytes of the Vezere Valley, Smithsonian Report, 1872, p. 95.* In Contributions to North American Ethnology, 1877, i. p. 43, Dall statesthat the debris of the heaps show tolerably uniform division into three stages,characterised by the food which formed the staple of subsistence and by theweapons for obtaining as well as the utensils for preparing the food. Thestages are : 1st, The Littoral period, represented by the Echinus layer2nd, The Fishing period, represented by the Fish-bone layer ; 3rd, TheHimting period, represented by the Mammalian layer. This antecedenceof fishing before hunting, if Dall be correct, was, I imagine, caused probablyby local or climatic conditions in the Arctic Circle ; it is not the general ruleelsewhere.