GoKawiilMany centuries before the advent of agriculture in Norway, ancient people transported fish into mountain lakes to create a source of food, then built wooden traps to catch them
The exposed bed of Lake Tesse in Norway, where archaeologists found ancient fish traps Magne Samdal, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo
Hunter-gatherers transported brown trout into the mountains of Norway at least 7000 years ago so they could be harvested during summer foraging trips into the highlands.
That is the only possible explanation for how fish could have populated isolated mountain lakes that had been covered by a kilometres-thick ice sheet for tens of thousands of years, says Axel Mjærum at the University of Oslo, Norway.
“This is the oldest documented example of human-mediated translocation of fish in the world,” says Mjærum.
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Until around 8400 years ago, Lake Tesse, at an elevation of around 850 metres, was covered by the Fennoscandian ice sheet, leaving an ecological blank canvas once it retreated.
Yet before it was transformed for hydropower storage in the 1940s, Lake Tesse was regarded as one of the richest brown trout waterways in Norway, yielding 9 tonnes of the fish annually.
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While it has long been suspected that humans had a hand in establishing the brown trout population in Lake Tesse, we had no idea how long ago this happened.
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