Fish Are Our Shoal Food

Our ancestors knew the value of the bounty that existed in oceans and lakes — and we still use their methods today, says Philip Siddell

- Philip Siddell

Often when I’m waxing lyrical on the source of my love of fishing I talk about the atavistic impulse. I cite it as a catch-all term for that deep connection to our ancestors I experience when engrossed in the sport. In modern parlance, it’s the flow state I slip into as a well-cast fly glides toward a trout lie.

For hundreds of thousands of years, fish and molluscs have been a fundamental source of sustenance for our genus. Is it any wonder that we have retained our genius for angling far beyond its utility in a developed agrarian society?

Indeed, we may owe a deeper debt of gratitude to the fisheries that fed us than previously realized. Emerging schools of thought suspect that fish-rich diets provided us with nutrients essential for brain development. Those nutrients kick-started the growth of our outsized brains and allowed us to become the dominant species we are today.

Whatever it was that first drew us to seek food in the water, once we had turned our attention to fish, there was no end to devising innovative ways to catch them.

By hand and chance

Early fishing efforts were opportunistic, a happy result of seasonal change and fish reproductive cycles. Nature created traps for us in the form of shallow pools on floodplains and among rocks on the beach where certain species would remain as the waters ebbed away.

Little skill was required to harvest fish in these circumstances — it was detailed knowledge of the seasons that brought success. It is impossible to know the origins of this practice or to date it, but it’s interesting to note that this activity persists in parts of Africa. People still retrieve large, stranded catfish from shallow pools on floodplains, clubbing them to death and processing them on-site to avoid spoilage in the heat.