SOME FACTORS BEARING ON THE UTILIZATION OF 



MARINE PRODUCTS OF THE WEST 



COAST OF CANADA 



By Neal M. Carter 



Pacific Fisheries Experimental Station 



Fisheries Research Board of Canada 



Vancouver, B.C., Canada 



Fish and shellfish have been a food of man from prehistoric times. 

 Remains of fish bones and marine shells exist in the debris of Pleistocene 

 period European cave dwellers, and the kitchen middens of Recent 

 period Indians of the coast of British Columbia are composed principally 

 of clam shells with a few fish bones. Because of the ease with which 

 they can be secured, shellfish probably attracted prehistoric man's at- 

 tention before he recognized their edibility. Perhaps his first taste of 

 fish followed seeing some animal or bird devouring a fish it had caught; 

 seeking more of this delicate food, no doubt his first efforts at "fishing" 

 consisted of picking up dead or stranded fish in shallow streams, on the 

 beach, or in tidal pools. Soon (maybe a thousand years later) his grow- 

 ing inventiveness developed the first true fishing methods. One of the 

 earliest must have been the placing of a barrier of stones, stakes or 

 branches in a shallow stream, or a circlet of rocks on a tidal beach in 

 imitation of natural tidal pools. The writer has seen such artificial tidal 

 pools, constructed in modern times, still in use by the native British 

 Columbia Indians not more than a hundred miles up the coast from 

 Vancouver. The chronology of the invention of such fixed barriers, in 

 relation to the invention of transportable fishing gear, is lost in pre- 

 historic antiquity. Examples of fish spears have been found in prehis- 

 toric caves; nets and lines may have been used contemporarily but owing 

 to their more perishable nature traces of them have vanished. Pictorial 

 records of fishing nets antedate those of fish spears, and it is known that 

 the spear, net, line, and rod flourished synchronously as early as the 

 Xllth Egyptian Dynasty. The earliest picture of angling and hand 

 lining is dated at about 2000 B.C. 



Once adequate methods of capturing fish for food became developed, 

 it is interesting to note the very great esteem accorded to fish as an article 

 of commerce and diet in early historical times. The Bible alone con- 

 tains some 80 references to fishing, fishermen, fish and other aquatic 

 products, though curiously enough in no instance is any kind of fish 



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