Natufian Hunter-Gatherers Fishing Strategies: The Early Appearance of the Fishhooks in the Near East and Their Significance

Abstract

Fish are a prominent source of nutrients, yet in the southern Levant, clear evidence for fishing was scarce before the historic periods. In the current paper, we present the evidence for Natufian (ca. 15,000–11,700 cal BP) fishing with an emphasis on fishhooks, representing one of the best examples of an artefact that reached its morphological optimum thousands of years ago and continued to be widely used today. While fishing using various techniques and implements was probably in use well before the Natufian, this innovation seems to represent a new technique, more restricted and controlled, for obtaining this food source.