October 21, 2014 — Stone Age hunters didn’t need to tell fish tales—the fish they caught really were whoppers, according to a new study.
Remains of prehistoric fish dinners from caves in northern Spain suggest that Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) and brown trout (Salmo trutta) have shrunk significantly in size over the past 20,000 years—from a combined average of up to 5 pounds (2.2 kilograms) to about a pound (0.4 kilogram).
What’s more, it’s because of our ancient ancestors’ fishing skills that rivers in the region today are populated with much smaller fish, according to a team of scientists from the University of Oviedo in Spain. (See “Hot Stew in the Ice Age? Evidence Shows Neanderthals Boiled Food.”)
That’s because the scientists suspect that the Stone Age fishers deliberately targeted larger specimens.
“Bigger fish will be more valuable as food,” said archaeologist Pablo Turrero, who led the study. “They would only have caught the small fish if they absolutely had to because there was nothing else.”
Over time, prehistoric hunters’ preference for catching big ones caused salmon and trout to downsize, because proportionally more small fish survived to breed and pass on their genes.
A trend for shrinking sizes starts to show up in the cave fish fossils about 10,000 years ago, “but size selection had been going on all the time,” said Turrero.
Read the full story from National Geographic