researcher have uncovered what they think to be the oldest fish hooks ever reveal , dating to around 23,000 years honest-to-goodness . The findings , published inPNAS , show how marine engineering was much more advanced and widespread at this time period of time , and open an insight into how early mankind were surviving in environments researcher traditionally consider were uninhabitable .
Found in a caveon the Japanese island of Okinawa , which is settle about half way between Taiwan and Japan , the hook add up to the grounds that humans have been visit the island for the past 50,000 years , but crucially they also suggest at something else . It has long been assumed that there was not enough imagination on the tiny orbit of land to keep going ancient humans for a protracted period of clock time , but the breakthrough of fishing hooks seems to intimate otherwise , and that people were able to exploit a much larger reach of resource .
We know that unco by around 47,000 years ago , as humankind unfold throughout Southeast Asia , they must have develop some pattern of advanced marine technology in order for multitude to have hopped from island to island . Yet grounds of this applied science , from the ships used to sail on the water , to tools used to exploit it , are few and far between . This is why the discovery of these early fish hooks , which just wash up the antecedently cognise oldest hooks by around 5,000 years , are of such unbelievable grandness .
Over a period of three years , research worker have been excavatingthe Sakitari Cave find on Okinawa , in which they have found grounds that the humans who land there feasted upon a wide range of solid food , from eels to frogs , to little mammal . But among all the charred bones litter the floor , they also notice human corpse , along with objects they craft such as astragal , possibly a grindstone , and the fish snare in motion . They found two fully made hooks craft from seashells , and what they consider is the beginning of another two that were never finished , that they could date to 23,000 years ago using the charcoal in the same layer fo the dig .
The find from the cave back up claim that people at the fourth dimension were a lot more innovative with their nautical technology than grounds tends to suggest , but it also provides confirmation that these early humans were exploiting seasonal food product . Also base in the cavewere the remains of crabs , and particularly declamatory one at that , which suggest that they were caught when the crustaceans migrate down the rivers on the island during the mating season and the crabs are at their biggest . This simply lend the weight that these people knew their surround intimately , and understandably had the tools to overwork it expeditiously .
