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Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago

newscientist.com

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Re: Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago

#81

Post by spwa4 »

mothballed wrote: post #38
spwa4 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't care and "respond strongly" to insults or territorial disputes (which involve both actual land, men, women, and children), to the point that sometimes dozens of people die in the resulting fight. They kill because of insults (which mostly involves sex). Oh and they do quite a bit for alcohol. They'll fuck visitors, just to see if their next kid is white (but, of course, if you go along with that you lose w…

Sounds like you need alcohol, and also a pistol, with a few full magazines. Just in case. Try not to let the women see it, if you have occasion to remove your clothes.

I would suggest to make sure you are never seen just by yourself by these people.

Re: Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago

#82

Post by bluGill »

t-3 wrote: post #57
sejje wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if it's recorded. This is inferred, not written down. Hunter-gatherers aren't known for their civilizations.

Civilization refers to cities, not literature. Urban societies need writing and complex social rules to survive, but it's not as if those things can't or haven't arisen in other types of human societies.

Have they? I'm no historian, but from what I can tell following discussions of real historians they think that alphabet developed exactly once, and then spread (this leaves open the possibility non-alphabet writing may have developed separately).

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.

Re: Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago

#83

Post by ijidak »

Theodores wrote: post #67
m463 wrote: post #2

> That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes 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)

Before we developed a taste for fish, marine life was far more abundant, particularly in rivers. There are rivers that we consider to be in good health today that have a fraction of the original species. For example, the Thames in London was once full of eels, nowadays an eel in the Thames poses a mystery as to 'how it got there'. By full, that means not being able to see the bottom of the river due to the amount of…

Went to a museum in Seattle. Can't remember the name of it. They explained that the salmon were so abundant in the Pacific Northwest during the early frontier period that they would catch them by the bucket full using water wheels and use the dead salmon to fertilize farms.

Humans have decimated Earth's abundance.

Re: Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago

#84

Post by ErroneousBosh »

m463 wrote: post #2

> That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes 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)

As well as the other answer I think aquatic birds will occasionally get fish eggs stuck to them and scatter them about.

Re: Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago

#85

Post by ErroneousBosh »

BurningFrog wrote: post #45
giancarlostoro wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Close, I looked it up out of curiosity, it seems Waterfowl eat the eggs, but they travel through their digestive system fully alive. Really interesting even so!

I can see how the evolutionary advantage of such hardened eggs would be huge!

Evolved so they *only* hatch after passing through the digestive system of a waterfowl might be a good evolutionary trick to avoid inbreeding.

Your eggs won't hatch until they're well away from your relatives.

Re: Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago

#86

Post by ErroneousBosh »

soperj wrote: post #56
stevenwoo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case they have carbon dated wooden equipment for fish farming and know due to geological factors when the lake could support fish, though of course the fish might have gotten there first somehow. I thought this was interesting because it predates agriculture in the same area.

How did wooden equipment not whither away in 7000 years?

In the peat bogs on Skye where I grew up and where people still cut peat for fuel, you often see the remains of silver birch trees that must have grown a couple of thousand years ago.

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.

Re: Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago

#87

Post by ErroneousBosh »

Kye wrote: post #53
stevenwoo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case they have carbon dated wooden equipment for fish farming and know due to geological factors when the lake could support fish, though of course the fish might have gotten there first somehow. I thought this was interesting because it predates agriculture in the same area.

Humans were shaping their environments to produce food long before they plowed fields. Hunter-gatherers didn't just hunt and gather willy-nilly, picking up whatever they found, oblivious to how it got there.

It blows my tiny wee Homo just-about-Sapiens mind that I have this brain which evolved to travel at walking pace for a few hours and think in terms of "you get loads of rabbits about an hour's walk from here behind those hills, and the really good berries are that way down towards the river".

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.

Re: Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago

#88

Post by ge96 »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #73
giancarlostoro wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Birds can drop fish after they've captured them. Not longer than a year now, we were visiting my wife's family, and me and my father in law got to Walmart there was a dead fish in the front, but when we mentioned it to my wife who got there before us (separate cars) she said it was struggling for life when they saw it, I don't think there was a lake nearby enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if birds have accidentall…

Yeah, but at least two live fish (a male and female) being dropped into the same remote lake, then finding each other at spawning time seems increasing implausible. Never say never, but ... 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…

The fish equivalent of https://soundcloud.com/noisykeyboard/last-kauai-oo-extinct or my weekends

Re: Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago

#89

Post by sampsn »

m463 wrote: post #2

> That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes 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)

or they havent always been land locked
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