South Florida Fly Fishing | Captain Earle Waters

Homo sapiens continued fostering more complex societies. By 130,000 years ago, they were interacting with other groups based nearly 200 miles away. Studies of modern-day hunter-gatherers offer a glimpse into the lifestyle of small, nomadic tribes dating back almost 2 million years ago. Evidence of fire exists at early Homo erectus sites, including 1.5 million-year-old Koobi Fora in Kenya, though these may be the remains of wildfires.

Fishers are people who draw their living from a hard, uncontrollable world that is perfectly indifferent to their fortunes or suffering. Many of them still fish with hooks, lines, nets, and spears that are virtually unchanged since the Ice Age. Yet ancient fisher folk and their communities have almost entirely escaped scholarly study. Such communities held their knowledge close to their chests and seldom gave birth to powerful monarchs or divine rulers. And they conveyed knowledge from one generation to the next by word of mouth, not writing. The ancient Egyptians, the Inca, and other civilizations relied heavily on fishing to feed their workforces and to sustain sailing expeditions to new lands.

Animal totems such as bear, lion, wolf… represented for these clans. The heads of clans and respected elders lead Algonquian’s communities. Relationships in Algonquian society are established through the father, not the mother. After a woman is married to a man, she joins and lives with her husband’s family. In other words, the man in Algonquian society is the head of the family. Algonquian inhabited a very large territory stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains.

The reason is they had the least interest in producing their food. Most of their territory was forested or more mountainous. If a man wants to become a chief, he has to justify and convince all of the members in council by actions that choosing him is the right decision.

As city populations grew, fish became a commodity, harvested by the thousands. Fishers transported their catches to small towns and then cities, bringing fish to markets and temples. For the first time, some communities became virtually full-time fishers, bartering or selling fish in town and village markets in exchange for other necessities. In time, too, fish became rations of standard size, issued to noble and commoner alike. The ruler and the state required hundreds, even thousands, of skilled and unskilled laborers.

They could find some animals such as hare or partridge in the forest or spearfish in the lakes and rivers. They lived in wigwams or roundhouse and these wigwams could be moved. The Algonquian moved from place to place and hunted for their food.

The culture accelerated with the appearance of Homo erectus (1.9 million years ago), whose larger brain and shorter digestive system reflected the increased consumption of meat. Additionally, these were the first hominins built for long-distance walking, pushing nomadic tribes into Asia and Europe. As we saw above, gathering is a more important subsistence activity closer to the equator. Since gathering is more often women’s work, and hunting more often men’s work, this may account for the relationship. How we define terms will affect the outcome of a cross-cultural study. As discussed further in the Arts module, Lomax theorizes that songs reflect the way people in a society work.

The ancestors of these large fish fed thousands of Khmer laborers as they built the nearby stupendous temples of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom in the 12th century. The Land of the Pharaohs depended heavily on its fisher folk. Nile River catfish were easy to harvest, especially during the spring spawn, before they were gutted and dried in the tropical sun on large racks. The authorities assigned teams of fishers to catch specific quotas within set periods, especially when the flood was receding. Large seine nets provided much of the catch, deployed and hauled in by teams of villagers.