Posted on 05/21/2025 9:37:50 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Phys.org reports that farmers were transporting live fish to stock mountain lakes in the Pyrenees much earlier than previously thought. High mountain lakes are often historically fishless due to natural barriers created by glaciers, as was the case with Lake Redon in northeastern Spain. The 240-foot-deep lake is isolated from fluvial waterways by a 330-foot waterfall, which makes it impossible for fish to naturally enter and colonize it. However, there are an estimated 60,000 brown trout living in it today. Historic documents record that the process of fish stocking was begun by at least the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Recent sedimentary DNA analysis, though, detected the presence of fish parasites in the lakebed dating back to between the seventh and ninth century. This suggests that late Roman or Visigothic farmers who used the region for sheep pasturing initially began stocking the lake with fish 500 years earlier than scholars originally believed. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Nature Communications.
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
“Put on this monster costume and get in the water.”
“Will they be able to see my face?”
“No.”
“Deal.”
Sounds like the lake is up to its gills in brown trout.
Very cool. And smart. Probably took some effort to transport live fish in wagons, but they also knew once stocked with fish it would cultivate itself with little need for outside intervention. That gave them an alternative food source that didn’t need to be herded or tilled.
Or pastured per se, or fed. As soon as catching fish was figured out (perhaps by watching a bear or bird do it), humans have probably relied on it at least as much as (other) hunting.
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