In this case they have carbon dated wooden equipment for fish farming and know due to geological factors when the lake could support fish, though of course the fish might have gotten there first somehow. I thought this was interesting because it predates agriculture in the same area.
Humans were shaping their environments to produce food long before they plowed fields. Hunter-gatherers didn't just hunt and gather willy-nilly, picking up whatever they found, oblivious to how it got there.
It blows my tiny wee Homo just-about-Sapiens mind that I have this brain which evolved to travel at walking pace for a few hours and think in terms of "you get loads of rabbits about an hour's walk from here behind those hills, and the really good berries are that way down towards the river".
And yet despite that it can quite happily plan out and navigate a route that is hundreds of miles long, at roughly 20 times the speed it was designed to travel at.
I'm sitting here writing a text message to someone 1800 miles away giving them directions to a shop in Vienna and I can visualise where they need to go for that to all work, with a brain that evolved to think about "not the next hill but the one after that" distance.
Intact human bodies thousands of years old have been found in Irish bogs - cold, anoxic, acidic. Apparently in this case cold and anoxic were part of it, and also pine resin in the wood acting as a perservative.
In the peat bogs on Skye where I grew up and where people still cut peat for fuel, you often see the remains of silver birch trees that must have grown a couple of thousand years ago.
They're often so well-preserved that not only can you clearly see the markings on the bark but you can sometimes make out the rings in the wood.
I remember my dad pulling out a piece that was so well preserved you could see where deer had gnawed it.
Birds can drop fish after they've captured them. Not longer than a year now, we were visiting my wife's family, and me and my father in law got to Walmart there was a dead fish in the front, but when we mentioned it to my wife who got there before us (separate cars) she said it was struggling for life when they saw it, I don't think there was a lake nearby enough, but I wouldn't be surprised if birds have accidentally introduced life into new bodies of water.
More likely is that birds move fish between bodies of water because of fish eggs they carry on their bodies. This is how most bodies of water become supremely populated in Texas. In Texas all ground water sources, other than 1 lake on the far east side, are created by people in recent decades and almost all of these bodies are full of fish that did not get there on their own.
Interestingly, it is not always the case that birds can drop what they catch. I never knew this until I watched an eagle struggle to shore after it caught a fish that turned out to be too large for it to fly off with or do what it needed to do to be able to release the fish until it got to land. I have no idea about the swimming ability of an eagle but they certainly can't swim when they have a large fish in their claws, it was quite the struggle for that eagle to get to shore.
Before we developed a taste for fish, marine life was far more abundant, particularly in rivers. There are rivers that we consider to be in good health today that have a fraction of the original species. For example, the Thames in London was once full of eels, nowadays an eel in the Thames poses a mystery as to 'how it got there'.
By full, that means not being able to see the bottom of the river due to the amount of eels present.
We ate them all.
The eels made it all the way to the Sargasso Sea and back, for breeding purposes. Clearly they would not be able to get from the sea to a fully landlocked lake, with no route to the sea.
However, my point is that we had so much marine life before we cleared out the rivers, to then need the sea, to go from coastal waters to the depths of the Antarctic ocean in the quest for any fish that have survived previous quests. It is just hard for us to imagine the abundance there once was, and, therefore, the relative ease to populate an isolated alpine meadow lake with fish in former times.
Went to a museum in Seattle. Can't remember the name of it. They explained that the salmon were so abundant in the Pacific Northwest during the early frontier period that they would catch them by the bucket full using water wheels and use the dead salmon to fertilize farms.
In 1873, French novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote that if every egg reached maturity, within three years “you could walk across the Atlantic dryshod on the backs of cod.” In 1885, the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture said it was not only impossible to exhaust the cod supply, but even to make a noticeable dent in it. “Unless the order of nature is overthrown, for centuries to come our fisheries will continue to be fertile,” the ministry declared.
This is one of the biggest problems with science. Lack of imagination an partially cooked theories written as gods speak and engraved in marble forever. Is true than being selectively blind may be a requisite in the stupid publish or perish race rat.
Trouts are stubborn fishes, able to jump. If the idea is that lakes created thousand years ago, never had a hidden sink connecting karst systems, a temporary river or a specially big detaw flood that trouts could use... okay, prove it.
Only among people who've never looked into it. Generally it happens because birds drop them and also birds occasionally get fish eggs stuck to them and move them around.
> As well as living matter, inorganic substances also crash to earth, including seeds, stones and sand. However, these pale in comparison to the mighty ice blocks. January 2000 saw several chunks weighing up to four kilograms each fall on Spain, but they're dwarfed by the 200kg titans that struck Brazil in 1995.
Wat. Does anyone have a reference for the Brazil one? Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacryometeor ) mentions nothing. Megacryometeors: Distribution on Earth and Current Research (2006)[0] says:
> In Campinas and Itapira, Brazil, two huge megacryometeors of 50 and 200 kg fell in 1997; the atmosphericisotopic signature of both specimens wasunequivocally confirmed (8). Finally, on 21 July 2004, a huge mass of ice weighingapproximately 400 kg fell very close to a 15-year-old girl in Toledo, Spain.
400kg! Unfortunately, no reference is given for this one and for the one in Brazil they refer to https://cepagri.unicamp.br/gelo/gelo.html, which – like many other of their references – produces a 404 nowadays. And, of course, the page hasn't gotten preserved by the Internet Archive, either. :(
I thought bird poop was the commonly accepted explanation
7000 years ago is the edge of recorded human civilization
(well 8000 years, I remember this because it's also the edge of a gamma ray burst in light years that could destroy all life on earth after traveling all that time)
Yes. One thing that becomes very obvious if you go along "native" human villages in Africa is the reason civilization develops. When you look at villages that don't grow, but do the normal human thing. Grow, war (2 kinds: young vs old and village/tribe vs village/tribe), grow.
It's not because of agriculture. They have agriculture (they grow maniok, and you don't need much. They have fire, weapons, ... Also the entire countryside is full of grain). It's not that they don't understand how things work. They just don't care.
It's not because they're dumb. In fact on pretty much all measures the humans living in those villages are better, in a genetic sense, than we are. They're smarter. They're more beautiful. Every last one is in shape, even the oldest (the oldest, btw, are maybe 45, not that they even know themselves. In both villages I saw the oldest was a couple). They're even better, genetically, than the black people living in cities around them. They have no sick (maybe 1), because the sick are dead. Even sick children regularly die. They bury their dead, with respect, after a burial but to say they have a religion is overstating matters. They have noone that can't run a marathon, or is fat, or ... because if you can't hunt you don't eat. Wounds are deadly. Not because the wound is so serious, but because you're nearly guaranteed to develop fever and die. Most people die from complications with infections. They have only beautiful men and women, because if you can't participate in "evening activities" you'll go hungry or get murdered (and it's not just men: women have lovers kill other men due to "insults", or they poison someone. And regularly it doesn't take much incentive at all for a murder to happen). Sometimes they (try to) treat cities the way the treat neighboring tribes: they attack them to kill everyone (at the very least all men). That usually fails due to guns, but it's not like it never works.
There are very few people in those villages that want to leave. And they're not about to starve. There's no need for civilization, and, frankly, they don't want to. But also, I don't care what religion or non-religion you have: you will find that way of live thoroughly immoral.
hmmm, I have seen big fish in much bigger birds claws, and have seen even bigger birds dive bombing other birds to force them to drop there fish
plus a bird can get a fish over ANY lake in
minuits, vs an all day random fish carrying hike?
so to recap, I have seen many birds with fish, but zero human fish hikers
Somewhat related, after desert rains you can often see fairy shrimp (think sea monkeys you might have had as a kid) swimming around in the isolated pools that form. I looked this up after wondering how the heck these water creatures could survive dozens of miles from the nearest permanent water source.
The answer is that their eggs are extremely lightweight, so much so that wind can carry them long distances. Their entire life cycle is extremely accelerated. Once water soaks the eggs the critters can hatch, develop, and lay new eggs in a matter of days. The newly laid eggs have a tiny chance of reaching a new seasonal pool area.
One possibility for fish eggs getting to lakes I want to propose is extreme weather. Winds can move sand from side of earth to the other. Flooding. Tornadoes.
* Accidental human seeding. Rather than bringing a full grown fish up to a lake, is it possible that the eggs could have been in waterskins/containers and when the humans refilled them, the eggs washed out?
* What about eels? Eels can travel across land in damp conditions (and Norway is damp much of the time). Could they take other fish eggs with them?
Related: Fish were introduced to Crater Lake in the US a little over a hundred years ago, and is generally considered to have been the wrong thing to do.
If you go there, you're free to fish to your heart's content.
42 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 6.2 ms ] threadisn't that a common question?
"How do fish appear in landlocked lakes/ponds/etc"?
After digging a pond and letting it fill with rainwater/groundwater, fish appear. I don't think its because people carried them there.
(don't really know the common answer though)
And yet despite that it can quite happily plan out and navigate a route that is hundreds of miles long, at roughly 20 times the speed it was designed to travel at.
I'm sitting here writing a text message to someone 1800 miles away giving them directions to a shop in Vienna and I can visualise where they need to go for that to all work, with a brain that evolved to think about "not the next hill but the one after that" distance.
They're often so well-preserved that not only can you clearly see the markings on the bark but you can sometimes make out the rings in the wood.
I remember my dad pulling out a piece that was so well preserved you could see where deer had gnawed it.
It has lots of amphibians and snakes. Rarely any birds.
There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places.
You can even see their scheduled fish plantings online:
https://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FishPlants/PublicPlantSearch
https://www.raptorresource.org/2021/01/22/racheting-raptor-t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals
> Tornadoes and waterspouts may lift up animals into the air and deposit them miles away.
By full, that means not being able to see the bottom of the river due to the amount of eels present.
We ate them all.
The eels made it all the way to the Sargasso Sea and back, for breeding purposes. Clearly they would not be able to get from the sea to a fully landlocked lake, with no route to the sea.
However, my point is that we had so much marine life before we cleared out the rivers, to then need the sea, to go from coastal waters to the depths of the Antarctic ocean in the quest for any fish that have survived previous quests. It is just hard for us to imagine the abundance there once was, and, therefore, the relative ease to populate an isolated alpine meadow lake with fish in former times.
Humans have decimated Earth's abundance.
In 1873, French novelist Alexandre Dumas wrote that if every egg reached maturity, within three years “you could walk across the Atlantic dryshod on the backs of cod.” In 1885, the Canadian Ministry of Agriculture said it was not only impossible to exhaust the cod supply, but even to make a noticeable dent in it. “Unless the order of nature is overthrown, for centuries to come our fisheries will continue to be fertile,” the ministry declared.
Humans find a way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
Maybe an explanation, even a decent one, but not the only possible, not by a mile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals
This is one of the biggest problems with science. Lack of imagination an partially cooked theories written as gods speak and engraved in marble forever. Is true than being selectively blind may be a requisite in the stupid publish or perish race rat.
Trouts are stubborn fishes, able to jump. If the idea is that lakes created thousand years ago, never had a hidden sink connecting karst systems, a temporary river or a specially big detaw flood that trouts could use... okay, prove it.
Only among people who've never looked into it. Generally it happens because birds drop them and also birds occasionally get fish eggs stuck to them and move them around.
Charles Fort collected numerous data for his famous "The Book of the Damned" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Damned
> As well as living matter, inorganic substances also crash to earth, including seeds, stones and sand. However, these pale in comparison to the mighty ice blocks. January 2000 saw several chunks weighing up to four kilograms each fall on Spain, but they're dwarfed by the 200kg titans that struck Brazil in 1995.
Wat. Does anyone have a reference for the Brazil one? Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megacryometeor ) mentions nothing. Megacryometeors: Distribution on Earth and Current Research (2006)[0] says:
> In Campinas and Itapira, Brazil, two huge megacryometeors of 50 and 200 kg fell in 1997; the atmosphericisotopic signature of both specimens wasunequivocally confirmed (8). Finally, on 21 July 2004, a huge mass of ice weighingapproximately 400 kg fell very close to a 15-year-old girl in Toledo, Spain.
400kg! Unfortunately, no reference is given for this one and for the one in Brazil they refer to https://cepagri.unicamp.br/gelo/gelo.html, which – like many other of their references – produces a 404 nowadays. And, of course, the page hasn't gotten preserved by the Internet Archive, either. :(
[0]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4315744 , PDF download available on https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6561843_Megacryomet...
7000 years ago is the edge of recorded human civilization
(well 8000 years, I remember this because it's also the edge of a gamma ray burst in light years that could destroy all life on earth after traveling all that time)
It's not because of agriculture. They have agriculture (they grow maniok, and you don't need much. They have fire, weapons, ... Also the entire countryside is full of grain). It's not that they don't understand how things work. They just don't care.
It's not because they're dumb. In fact on pretty much all measures the humans living in those villages are better, in a genetic sense, than we are. They're smarter. They're more beautiful. Every last one is in shape, even the oldest (the oldest, btw, are maybe 45, not that they even know themselves. In both villages I saw the oldest was a couple). They're even better, genetically, than the black people living in cities around them. They have no sick (maybe 1), because the sick are dead. Even sick children regularly die. They bury their dead, with respect, after a burial but to say they have a religion is overstating matters. They have noone that can't run a marathon, or is fat, or ... because if you can't hunt you don't eat. Wounds are deadly. Not because the wound is so serious, but because you're nearly guaranteed to develop fever and die. Most people die from complications with infections. They have only beautiful men and women, because if you can't participate in "evening activities" you'll go hungry or get murdered (and it's not just men: women have lovers kill other men due to "insults", or they poison someone. And regularly it doesn't take much incentive at all for a murder to happen). Sometimes they (try to) treat cities the way the treat neighboring tribes: they attack them to kill everyone (at the very least all men). That usually fails due to guns, but it's not like it never works.
There are very few people in those villages that want to leave. And they're not about to starve. There's no need for civilization, and, frankly, they don't want to. But also, I don't care what religion or non-religion you have: you will find that way of live thoroughly immoral.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5w35n0Hm_m0
I hate how much of historical science is performed this way. Speculation is not very scientific.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/special-delivery-d...
The answer is that their eggs are extremely lightweight, so much so that wind can carry them long distances. Their entire life cycle is extremely accelerated. Once water soaks the eggs the critters can hatch, develop, and lay new eggs in a matter of days. The newly laid eggs have a tiny chance of reaching a new seasonal pool area.
They've jumped to conclusions.
* Accidental human seeding. Rather than bringing a full grown fish up to a lake, is it possible that the eggs could have been in waterskins/containers and when the humans refilled them, the eggs washed out?
* What about eels? Eels can travel across land in damp conditions (and Norway is damp much of the time). Could they take other fish eggs with them?
If you go there, you're free to fish to your heart's content.