SUBSISTENCE × TECHNOLOGY

Jerimalai, the First Deep-Sea Fishing

~42,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

Jerimalai, also known as Asitau Kuru, is a rock shelter in Timor-Leste whose deepest levels are about 42,000 years old. Among the fish bones from those levels the excavators identified scombrids, the family that includes tunas and mackerels, fast swimmers of open water rather than reef dwellers. Capturing such fish, they argued, requires planning and complex maritime technology, and they concluded that the inhabitants were fishing well offshore. The same shelter produced a hook cut from shell, presented in 2011 as the earliest firm evidence of hook manufacture anywhere; hook technology is so far attested only from about 22,000 years ago, so that object belongs to a far later chapter of the sequence than the fish bones do.

Why it matters

Reaching Australia meant crossing open water by about 50,000 years ago, and no party to the argument denies it. What the shelter adds is the daily practice behind the crossing: fish taken in quantity, and taken for several millennia running, by trolling, by line and by spear. The site also shows how a claim about behaviour gets tested, since the dispute came down to which species the bones belong to, and to how far from shore those species can be caught.

Dating & uncertainty

Two questions must be kept apart. The age of the deposit is not contested: the lowest levels are about 42,000 years old and the scombrid bones lie in them. The depth of water is contested. Anderson objected that inshore fishing accounts for the same bones, and recorded that the excavators had not identified the scombrids to species, so that oceanic tunas cannot be shown to be present; fish remains published from the site in 2022 point to near-shore habitats. Should that reading prevail, what stands is early and sustained sea fishing, which is not the same claim as fishing on the high seas.

Sources

1. O'Connor et al. (2011), Science · Pelagic Fishing at 42,000 Years Before the Present and the Maritime Skills of Modern Humansdoi:10.1126/science.1207703
2. Anderson (2013), Antiquity · Response to O'Connor and Ono, Bailey and Erlandsondoi:10.1017/s0003598x00049589
3. Boulanger et al. (2022), World Archaeology · Continuity and variability in prehistoric fishing practices by Homo sapiens in Island Southeast Asia: new ichthyofaunal data from Asitau Kuru, Timor-Lestedoi:10.1080/00438243.2023.2192518
4. Langley et al. (2021), The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology · Fishhooks, Lures, and Sinkers: Intensive Manufacture of Marine Technology from the Terminal Pleistocene at Makpan Cave, Alor Island, Indonesiadoi:10.1080/15564894.2020.1868631

Our species’ history as one day

20:48:003 h 12 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day