alt.hn

7/27/2026 at 12:58:45 AM

Hunter-gatherers introduced fish to a mountain lake 7000 years ago

 https://www.newscientist.com/article/2580119-hunter-gatherers-introduced-fish-to-a-mountain-lake-7000-years-ago/

by stevenwoo

7/27/2026 at 4:06:52 AM

> That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes

isn'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)

by m463

7/29/2026 at 3:58:00 PM

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.

by giancarlostoro

7/29/2026 at 5:53:35 PM

Yeah, but at least two live fish (a male and female) being dropped into the same remote lake, then finding each other at spawning time seems increasing implausible. Never say never, but ...

Apparently some fish species do have small sticky eggs that can stick to the legs of water fowl, or even (with very small probability) pass through them intact, so this seems much more likely. Maybe a group of ducks feeding in one place then flying off to another?

by HarHarVeryFunny

7/29/2026 at 6:04:01 PM

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.

by austin-cheney

7/29/2026 at 6:15:40 PM

most of them are populated thanks to explicit efforts from the government.

by butvacuum

7/29/2026 at 7:02:44 PM

I once found a recently-dead minnow in the outfield where I was playing software. That was a weird one.

by Graziano_M

7/29/2026 at 8:16:09 PM

I've heard of remote work before but having you play software in the outfield seems a little extreme...

by readthenotes1

7/29/2026 at 2:11:24 PM

Fish eggs often travel long distances by sticking to the feathers or legs of waterfowl I have been told at school long ago.

by iefbr14

7/29/2026 at 3:59:51 PM

Close, I looked it up out of curiosity, it seems Waterfowl eat the eggs, but they travel through their digestive system fully alive. Really interesting even so!

by giancarlostoro

7/29/2026 at 4:02:52 PM

I can see how the evolutionary advantage of such hardened eggs would be huge!

by BurningFrog

7/29/2026 at 4:42:31 PM

I would think that would lead to a lot of inbred fish

by soperj

7/29/2026 at 8:21:18 PM

This tends to simply not be that much of a problem for "lower" species.

by vitally3643

7/29/2026 at 6:09:00 PM

If it happened just once, yes.

by prerok

7/29/2026 at 4:51:26 PM

a high rate of mutations would be an advantage in a new environment, though.

by lazystar

7/29/2026 at 6:09:15 PM

[dead]

by MagicMoonlight

7/29/2026 at 4:07:46 PM

Right, as long as you can still get out.

by barbazoo

7/29/2026 at 6:29:14 PM

Evolved so they *only* hatch after passing through the digestive system of a waterfowl might be a good evolutionary trick to avoid inbreeding.

Your eggs won't hatch until they're well away from your relatives.

by ErroneousBosh

7/29/2026 at 4:17:38 PM

I’ve wondered if natural phenomena like tornadoes could carry fish eggs those kinds of distances. Or even just carry the eggs into the clouds, to be rained down large distances away.

by hnlmorg

7/27/2026 at 4:47:34 PM

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.

by stevenwoo

7/29/2026 at 4:43:29 PM

How did wooden equipment not whither away in 7000 years?

by soperj

7/29/2026 at 5:49:18 PM

Artifacts that survive this long are usually found in a buried context, which can, under favorable conditions, preserve them for long periods of time.

The artifact can be buried by colluvial(gravity driven), or alluvial(water driven) deposition before they have a chance to decay. For more information you can consult a geomorphologist, which I am not.

by marking-time

7/29/2026 at 6:02:20 PM

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.

by HarHarVeryFunny

7/29/2026 at 5:01:52 PM

Likely isolated from oxygen in deep water or sediment

by zwirbl

7/29/2026 at 6:32:39 PM

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.

by ErroneousBosh

7/29/2026 at 4:25:59 PM

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.

by Kye

7/29/2026 at 5:10:47 PM

Yeah, you have to consider that when you're living in nature you actually need to identify the plants that are edible so you can't actually just eat everything you find even if you could eat it in theory.

So if you wanted to gather plant food how do you make sure that the food you find is edible?

It's quite simple. If you know a plant is edible you take the seeds and you carry them with you and broadcast them all over the place.

The interesting part about this is that this is also a form of selective breeding, since you're choosing the edible plants over the inedible plants.

Note that you do not tend to the plants or do any form of agriculture, you're still foraging from random plants you encounter.

by imtringued

7/29/2026 at 6:37:37 PM

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.

by ErroneousBosh

7/29/2026 at 2:45:11 PM

Mountain lakes are completely different.

There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places.

by wil421

7/29/2026 at 3:02:42 PM

This doesn't provide an answer for lakes.

But I always thought the explanation was eggs randomly getting stuck to bird feet. Or maybe a bird carries a fish with eggs up there and eats it or something. Inevitably it happens though...

by jjallen

7/29/2026 at 3:48:48 PM

Lakes have connected rivers and streams that provide paths for fish and eggs to move around. There are human and animal activities that affect this. Your bird example and beavers causing floods could allow movement.

by wil421

7/29/2026 at 3:55:50 PM

Isolated alpine lakes do not have connected rivers and streams, yet a ton are stocked with fish by humans.

Is it unbelievable that ancient hunter-gatherers would do the same thing?

by jmalicki

7/29/2026 at 4:26:48 PM

A lot of people are unaware of how much husbandry hunter-gatherers still did. They may not have been farmers, with field plantings, weeding, and harvest seasons designed to maximize every acre under production, but they weren't stupid and still spent time to bend the world around them to the task of providing them more resources than it would have on its own. On a bang-for-the-buck basis they often did better than the farmers, it's just that without farming you can't get that density and net return.

This looks like a good overview paper for interested folk: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3048989/

by jerf

7/29/2026 at 4:54:35 PM

We are on the same side. I’ve been trying to show the difference between natural water processes and some else like birds or humans spreading fish.

by wil421

7/29/2026 at 4:20:20 PM

So many lakes do not have rivers flowing in and out. A low spot in an area will become a lake.

Many do have rivers; many don't. Ponds even more so don't have attached rivers.

by jjallen

7/29/2026 at 5:56:55 PM

Many ponds have seasonal streams. In spring (when the snow melts) they get connected to the local river system by a shallow stream, then when the water levels go down the stream disappears but the pond remains. Also beavers may flood a large area, then move on leaving a formerly connected pond isolated again.

by bluGill

7/29/2026 at 3:33:18 PM

"Life finds a way"

- Dr. Ian Malcolm

by darknavi

7/29/2026 at 2:59:47 PM

How did they appear upstream?

by williamdclt

7/29/2026 at 3:06:30 PM

There’s a stream in my back yard that doesn’t hold fish over the winter because it’s too shallow/cold. A large property near me has a pond that overflows into my stream. The fish survive in the deeper waters of the pond and spring rain usually washes fish eggs or even fish into my stream. They gather in the rocks in my backyard near the storm drain.

Alpine lakes are fed by snow met. There’s not going to be fish eggs on the snowpack that melts into the lake.

by wil421

7/29/2026 at 4:03:18 PM

You yourself wrote in this thread:

> There’s fish eggs being washed everywhere during rain storms. The eggs come from upstream and wash into random places.

Do you realize that in the summer mountains below 4000m are mostly snow-free and thawing point ie in Europe has been pushed above 5000m repeatedly during summers. Its easy to have 25C in 2500m in today's alps (ie today 22C in 2000m in Chamonix, France).

The term 'alpine lake' doesn't mean anything specific, and most are fed from rain during entire summer without any/much of snow or ice contribution.

by kakacik

7/29/2026 at 3:50:49 PM

A tornado?

by ShinyLeftPad

7/29/2026 at 2:28:04 PM

I've had a pond for 11 years that has not acquired fish. It existed before that, too, but I'm not sure for how long (I think several decades).

It has lots of amphibians and snakes. Rarely any birds.

by sejje

7/29/2026 at 2:34:16 PM

Maybe the snakes have been eating the fish eggs / baby fish?

by profsummergig

7/29/2026 at 2:35:16 PM

The bullfrogs are the big carnivores, and sure, maybe.

Snakes are active but I doubt they eat nearly as much as the bullfrogs.

by sejje

7/29/2026 at 4:02:44 PM

Apparently if you introduce a large fish species to your pond, the bullfrogs will not eat them, not sure how you would secure the eggs though. Maybe some sort of area that could shelter from them, but once they come out of shelter when they hatch, its kind of the same problem.

Could also introduce fish that will eat the frogs to keep them under control. Or just leave it all as-is.

by giancarlostoro

7/29/2026 at 6:44:43 PM

or they havent always been land locked

by sampsn

7/29/2026 at 6:28:14 PM

As well as the other answer I think aquatic birds will occasionally get fish eggs stuck to them and scatter them about.

by ErroneousBosh

7/29/2026 at 5:31:44 PM

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.

by Theodores

7/29/2026 at 6:53:32 PM

A few comments on the previous abundance of cod, from https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/a-tragedy-wi...

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...

by noelwelsh

7/29/2026 at 6:24:00 PM

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.

Humans have decimated Earth's abundance.

by ijidak

7/29/2026 at 4:04:20 PM

It's not the only possible explanation. Fish can get sucked up by tornatos and get dropped later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_of_animals

> Tornadoes and waterspouts may lift up animals into the air and deposit them miles away.

by ekjhgkejhgk

7/29/2026 at 5:03:51 PM

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.

by rurp

7/29/2026 at 8:18:36 PM

Very old fish traps found, dated --> humans carried trout to the lake

They've jumped to conclusions.

by 1970-01-01

7/29/2026 at 6:59:16 PM

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.

by yrjrjjrjjtjjr

7/27/2026 at 5:58:19 AM

An alternative vector: "cloud seeding" (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/sep/09/science.rese...)

Charles Fort collected numerous data for his famous "The Book of the Damned" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Damned

by fractallyte

7/29/2026 at 6:47:09 PM

From the The Guardian article:

> 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...

by codethief

7/29/2026 at 3:00:50 PM

It rained fish in my front yard in South Carolina back in the 80's, it's definitely a real phenomenon.

by pnut

7/29/2026 at 3:22:00 PM

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

by metalman

7/29/2026 at 3:11:33 PM

> That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes

I hate how much of historical science is performed this way. Speculation is not very scientific.

by honeycrispy

7/29/2026 at 5:38:00 PM

Unfortunately the full article that they are reporting on is paywalled.

https://www.khm.uio.no/english/about/organisation/archaeolog...

To be fair, Gemini says there are no presumed cases of specifically brown trout populating an isolated water body by means other than human stocking. For other types of fish, maybe (eggs stick to bird legs, or one gets pooped out intact), but for brown trout, no! The eggs only survive in cold water, not inside a bird, are relatively large and non-sticky.

To survive a long schlepp up a mountain in a waterskin, it would presumably have been fertilized eggs that were transported (can be found in river gravel) since they have low oxygen needs. According to Gemini even baby fish might only survive a couple of hours, but eggs (if kept in cold water) could survive days or weeks, and obviously would be more practical to transport a sufficient number to have a decent chance of establishing a breeding colony.

Interesting stuff, but maybe better considered as reconstructive history than science.

by HarHarVeryFunny

7/29/2026 at 2:59:49 PM

Someone below mentions bird poop, but could a fish egg survive the human (or a dogs) digestive system as well?

by fred_is_fred

7/29/2026 at 2:15:24 PM

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)

by ck2

7/29/2026 at 2:35:58 PM

> 7000 years ago is the edge of recorded human civilization (well 8000 years

The earliest pre-pottery Neolithic complexes are nearly 4000 years older than that.

by masklinn

7/29/2026 at 2:44:45 PM

Did they have writing and kept records that we've found? That's the "recorded" part.

by ikidd

7/29/2026 at 4:08:48 PM

If writing is your yardstick then 7000 years is way too far back. There was likely proto-writing back then (some of the figures at gobekli tepe are found in a very similar form in later scripts of the area[1], there are clearer forms of proto-writings from CA 6000~7000 BCE in various cultures) however writing proper is only currently known from 3000 BCE onwards.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330759548_World's_F...

by masklinn

7/29/2026 at 5:43:53 PM

some disagreement emerges from the fact that there are several "cradles" of civilization, not just one where everything spread from

so they each have different timelines/landmarks

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_of_civilization

> The concept of a cradle of civilization has a focus where the inhabitants came to build cities, to create writing systems, to experiment in techniques for making pottery and using metals, to domesticate animals, and to develop complex social structures involving class systems

> Today, scholarship generally identifies six areas where civilization emerged independently: the Fertile Crescent, including Mesopotamia and the Levant; the Nile Valley in Northeast Africa; the Indo-Gangetic Plain; the North China Plain; the Andean Coast; and the Mesoamerican Gulf Coast

by ck2

7/29/2026 at 3:19:52 PM

In Norway, the oldest written records are barely 1000 years old.

by 0points

7/29/2026 at 2:25:28 PM

It doesn't matter if it's recorded. This is inferred, not written down.

Hunter-gatherers aren't known for their civilizations.

by sejje

7/29/2026 at 4:48:12 PM

Civilization refers to cities, not literature. Urban societies need writing and complex social rules to survive, but it's not as if those things can't or haven't arisen in other types of human societies.

by t-3

7/29/2026 at 6:17:20 PM

Have they? I'm no historian, but from what I can tell following discussions of real historians they think that alphabet developed exactly once, and then spread (this leaves open the possibility non-alphabet writing may have developed separately).

Also I believe that Urban society is needed just to give enough people enough leisure time to sit and think of things like this. Hunter gathers can learn to read/write, but to figure it out they couldn't do.

by bluGill

7/29/2026 at 3:03:24 PM

[dead]

by hnd9q09qk4

7/29/2026 at 2:32:06 PM

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.

by spwa4

7/29/2026 at 2:50:05 PM

Great point until the end. None of your descriptions imply a lack of morality for living isolated from a greater civilization. If anything, such small societies inhabit a neutral position, in that they don't care, which is something you already stated.

I think the only people arguing that the North Sentinelese are immoral are religious, for instance (hence why most attempts to visit are done by missions). The general consensus is otherwise awe for being separated from the rest of us, relatively unmolested.

by orsorna

7/29/2026 at 3:08:55 PM

Well, they sure are xenophobic.

by notathrowaway51

7/29/2026 at 2:57:51 PM

I do not think anyone is arguing the Sentinelese are immoral?

by graemep

7/29/2026 at 3:44:46 PM

Why would you bring a mission to a hostile island otherwise?

by orsorna

7/29/2026 at 5:32:40 PM

Because you believe you are proclaiming the truth and have a duty to do so. That does not mean you think they are immoral. Its just an extreme version of things such as the Christian duty to spread the word. Christianity has always had the concept of virtuous non-believers.

by graemep

7/29/2026 at 3:45:56 PM

Because you think god is immoral, and you want them to meet his mercy?

by mothballed

7/29/2026 at 4:11:13 PM

Do we know anything about their morals, aside from that they kill immigrants at sight?

by BurningFrog

7/29/2026 at 5:33:26 PM

Given how other Andaman islanders have been treated by outsiders hostility towards people who come there uninvited is understandable.

People going to their island are not "immigrants" - no intention of remaining.

by graemep

7/29/2026 at 3:22:08 PM

They don't care and "respond strongly" to insults or territorial disputes (which involve both actual land, men, women, and children), to the point that sometimes dozens of people die in the resulting fight. They kill because of insults (which mostly involves sex). Oh and they do quite a bit for alcohol. They'll fuck visitors, just to see if their next kid is white (but, of course, if you go along with that you lose whatever protection that "outsider who maybe brings alcohol" gave you. And you're sure to lose almost any fight). Also: don't make the mistake of still visibly having any alcohol when leaving the village.

Certainly it would be accurate to say that both the cities in the neighborhood and the central government have issues with this sort of thing. To say nothing of when cities get attacked.

by spwa4

7/29/2026 at 3:49:35 PM

Sounds like you need alcohol, and also a pistol, with a few full magazines. Just in case. Try not to let the women see it, if you have occasion to remove your clothes.

by mothballed

7/29/2026 at 6:16:11 PM

I would suggest to make sure you are never seen just by yourself by these people.

by spwa4

7/29/2026 at 5:23:20 PM

It's not obvious at all from your comment.

The answer is that they don't have a shared enemy in the form of an inhospitable environment like winter or the Egyptian desert.

by imtringued

7/29/2026 at 6:45:35 PM

well humans started only about 6000 years ago so this is probably false.

by sampsn