This caught me by surprise --- Pelagic Fishing at 42,000 Years Before the Present and the Maritime Skills of Modern Humans, Sue O’Connor, Rintaro Ono, Chris Clarkson writing in Science :
By 50,000 years ago, it is clear that modern humans were capable of long-distance sea travel as they colonized Australia. However, evidence for advanced maritime skills, and for fishing in particular, is rare before the terminal Pleistocene/early Holocene. Here we report remains of a variety of pelagic and other fish species dating to 42,000 years before the present from Jerimalai shelter in East Timor, as well as the earliest definite evidence for fishhook manufacture in the world. Capturing pelagic fish such as tuna requires high levels of planning and complex maritime technology. The evidence implies that the inhabitants were fishing in the deep sea.
Deep sea fish bones appear to be around 1/3 of all animal remains in these sites, so deep sea fishing is not a ritual side show.
Update #1: my wife point out that catching tuna 42,000 years ago may have much been easier than it is now. Tuna were more abundant and may have been behavorially easier to catch: as top predators they may have been unused to human predators. Not the chicken of the see, but the dodos of the sea. They didn't get wiped out by humans like many land animals, but could their behavior have changed?
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