These Ice Age Artworks Etched Into Rock 15,800 Years Ago May Be the Earliest Known Depictions of Fishing

After analyzing 15,800-year-old engraved stones from a campsite in western Germany, archaeologists have concluded that the rocks’ criss-crossed lines and shapes may be the oldest known depictions of fishing.

The stones were found at Gönnersdorf, an Ice Age archaeological site discovered in 1968 that holds “some of Europe’s richest ancient artistic treasures,” according to a statement from the Leibniz Center for Archaeology in Mainz, Germany.

The Late Upper Paleolithic communities that occupied the area left behind 406 small, flat stone plaques, many carved with images of animals they hunted, like wild horses, reindeer, mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses.

Now, researchers from the Monrepos Archaeological Research Center and Museum for Human Behavioral Evolution (a department of the Leibniz Center) and England’s Durham University have used advanced imaging techniques to analyze some of the site’s less-studied plaquettes, which are engraved with imprecise grid patterns and ovals. As they write in a study published this month in the journal PLOS One, some of the plaquettes may feature images of fish trapped in nets.

Per the study, these etchings are “nuanced depictions of fishing practices previously unrecorded for the Upper Paleolithic”—an era that took place during the last ice age, between about 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. While historians already knew that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers ate fish, the plaquettes may reveal how they caught them, according to the statement.

“This study provides the first unambiguous visual evidence of fishing nets in European prehistory, based on the engraved motifs of fish within grid-like patterns,” lead author Jérôme Robitaille, an archaeologist at Monrepos, tells Newsweek’s Aristos Georgiou.

Robitaille adds that evidence of Upper Paleolithic fish consumption—like bones, barbed artifacts and fishhooks—has been found in Europe before. “Yet, direct artistic portrayals of fishing are exceptionally rare,” he says.

The researchers used a technique called reflectance transformation imaging to “accentuate subtle details on the engraved surfaces” of the plaquettes, which exposed an “intricate link” between the grid patterns and fish figures, “showing that they were a deliberate combination portraying the use of fishing nets,” per the study.

“I was very surprised,” Robitaille tells All That’s Interesting’s Kaleena Fraga. He says the engravings suggest fishing “played a more vital role” in Ice Age society than researchers previously thought, “both as a subsistence strategy and as a cultural activity.”

The engravings also indicate that Gönnersdorf’s inhabitants placed an “artistic focus” on “the act of fishing,” which may have been a “structured, social and possibly seasonal activity,” Robitaille adds.

More than 81,000 artifacts have been found at Gönnersdorf over the years, including jewelry, tools, weapons, figurines and carved pieces of ivory and bone, according to All That’s Interesting.

Per the statement, the recent study of the engraved plaquettes not only offers “remarkable insights” into the social practices of Gönnersdorf’s hunter-gatherer communities, but also “expands the known repertoire of Ice Age art.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.