# Fishing rod and hook > A baited point at the end of a line - Date: 23,000 years ago - Era: Prehistory - Domain: [Food & Preservation](https://lastcodex.org/en/domains/food/) - Rebuild stage: I (Survival) - Difficulty: 2/5 - URL: https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/fishing-rod-and-hook/ A fishing hook is a small curved point tied to a line. The fish takes it with the bait, and when the line comes tight the point goes into its mouth. A rod carries the bait farther out and softens the pull of the fish. The oldest hooks known were ground from sea-snail shell about 23,000 years ago and found in Sakitari Cave on Okinawa. ![Fishing rod and hook · A baited point at the end of a line](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/plate.BVFUR4zR_Z1aWj3W.webp) ## Legend 1. Tapered rod 2. Line tied to the rod tip 3. Quill float 4. Stone sinker 5. Barbed bone hook lashed to the line ## What it is ![A slender sliver of pale bone, pointed at both ends, with a fibre line tied round its middle in a few tight turns](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v3.Cl19UDi7_Z29C96K.webp) _A gorge, tied by its middle, turns crosswise in the throat when the line is pulled._ Line fishing takes one fish at a time with bait on a hook at the end of a line. The hook is a small curved point. Fishers also used the gorge, a straight sliver of bone or wood pointed at both ends and tied by its middle: the fish swallows it with the bait, and when the line is pulled it turns crosswise in the throat. A curved hook holds in the mouth instead and can be used again and again. A line held in the hand is enough to fish from a boat or a rock. The rod adds reach. It carries the bait beyond the weeds near the bank, lets the angler stand back from the edge, and bends when the fish pulls, so a fine line is less likely to snap. A float holds the bait at a chosen depth and shows when a fish bites, and a weight takes the line down. Lures replace live bait with something that looks like food, and groundbait thrown into the water draws fish to the place where the hook waits. Catching many fish at once is the work of [fishing nets and traps](/en/inventions/fishing-nets-and-traps/). ## How it works The fish takes the bait into its mouth. When the angler pulls, the line comes tight and drags the point against the inside of the mouth until it goes in. The barb, a small spur cut backwards just behind the point, then stops the point sliding out while the fish struggles. A hook without a barb holds only while the line stays tight, but it comes out easily, which helps when a fish is to be put back. The line is tied at the top of the shank, so a pull draws the point in the direction of the shank and into the flesh. Many old hooks had no eye. The line was lashed to the shank below a knob, a groove or a turned-over end, which kept it from slipping off. The rod is a lever held at the butt. A small turn of the wrist moves the tip a long way, enough to set the hook quickly and lift a small fish clear of the water. Because the rod tapers, the tip bends first and takes up the sudden jerks of a fish. Without a reel the line was tied to the tip and was about as long as the rod, so a large fish had to be tired out at the end of it before it could be landed. The float rides upright on the surface. A small stone tied to the line below it is chosen so that the float barely stays up, and the slightest pull of a fish draws it under. Moving the float up or down the line sets how deep the bait hangs. ## How to do it For the rod, cut a straight, dry stick or cane 2 to 3 m long, thick at the butt and thin at the tip. Trim side shoots and knots with a knife or a sharp stone flake, always cutting away from your body. For the line, twist a thin cord from plant fibre, as for [rope](/en/inventions/rope/), or use strong linen thread. Tie it to the tip, wind it down the last 10 cm in close turns and tie it again, so that a pull cannot slide the knot off the end. Leave the line about as long as the rod. For the float, tie a dry feather quill or a short piece of light, dry wood to the line with a few turns of thread above and below. Below the float, tie on small stones in closed lashings, adding or removing them in a bucket of water until only the tip of the float shows above the surface. For the hook, take a flat piece of bone about 4 cm long and 3 mm thick, such as a cleaned and dried beef rib, or a piece of dense hardwood. Drill a hole through the middle with a hand drill or a pointed stone, then widen it with a round file or a rod of sandstone into a U-shaped slot. Cut through one arm of the U near its end to free the point, and grind the outside to the shape of a J, leaving a gap between point and shank. Sharpen the point on the stone, leave it without a barb, and cut a groove round the top of the shank. Lay the line in the groove, whip it on with tight turns of thread and finish with a knot. Test it by hooking a piece of wood and pulling hard on the line: a hook that cracks along the grain has to be made again. Clamp the bone or wood while drilling and grinding, wear safety glasses and a dust mask, since bone dust irritates the lungs, and keep the finished point covered. Fish only where it is allowed: most waters require a licence and set seasons, minimum sizes, limits and rules on the hooks that may be used. Keep back from steep or slippery banks, never fish alone beside deep or fast water, and keep away from overhead power lines with any rod. Use stones rather than lead weights, which poison water birds that swallow them. Take every piece of line home, because lost line traps birds and other animals. Wet your hands before touching a fish you will release, take the hook out gently and return the fish quickly. ## History and evolution ![A small one-piece hook ground from pearly sea-snail shell and curved like a J, lying beside the cone-shaped piece of shell it was cut from](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v1.CFmabJz5_Z1t8PzI.webp) _Long before metal, hooks were ground from the shell of large sea snails._ The oldest known hooks come from Sakitari Cave in the south of Okinawa. In 2016 Masaki Fujita and his colleagues described two one-piece hooks made by splitting and grinding the flat base of Trochus shells, a large sea snail. One is finished and the other unfinished. The finished hook lay in a layer dated by two pieces of charcoal found beside it to between 22,380 and 22,770 years before 1950, about 23,000 years ago. At Jerimalai shelter in East Timor, Sue O'Connor's team found a shell hook dated to between 23,000 and 16,000 years ago, in a site where people were already eating tuna and other open-sea fish 42,000 years ago. How those older fish were caught is not known. Copper hooks came later. In Egypt, bone hooks described as prehistoric, from Middle Egypt and from the Neolithic site of el-Omari near Helwan, are kept in the British Museum and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Copper hooks appear there shortly before the first dynasties, all without a barb. Oric Bates, who studied Egyptian fishing in 1917, found barbed hooks from the Twelfth Dynasty onwards and iron hooks used by Greeks in Egypt from about 600 BCE. Old Kingdom tomb scenes show men fishing from papyrus canoes with a line held in the hand, sometimes with a row of hooks and a weight at its end. The rod appears in the record much later than the hook. Bates found the first Egyptian pictures of fishing with a pole in the Middle Kingdom, when men fished from the bank with the line tied to its end. In China, a poem of the Book of Songs, a collection of songs of the Zhou period, speaks of long, slender bamboo rods used to fish in the river Qi, and another says the line was made of silk. In the Odyssey, Homer compares the sailors seized by Scylla to fish thrown ashore by a fisherman who casts his bait from a rock with a long rod. ![A bronze hook with scarlet wool wound round its shank and two pale feathers tied on, hanging from a horsehair line](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v2.DEdrDNjQ_Z275Fdn.webp) _A hook dressed with red wool and two feathers, as Aelian describes the Macedonian lure._ Aelian, a Roman author who wrote in Greek around 200 CE, describes anglers on the river Astraeus in Macedonia who caught spotted fish with a lure. Real insects lost their colour when handled, so they wound scarlet wool round the hook and tied on two wax-coloured feathers from under a cock's wattles. Their rod and their line were each six feet long. In 1496 Wynkyn de Worde printed at Westminster A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, the first book on fishing printed in England. Its rod has a butt made from a staff of hazel, willow or aspen a fathom and a half long, bored through its length with a hot wire. A long tip of hazel joined to blackthorn, crab tree, medlar or juniper fits into the bore to be carried and is set into the top of the staff for fishing. Lines were twisted from white horsehair, one hair for a minnow and up to fifteen for a salmon. Hooks were forged from steel needles: the barb was raised with a knife, the end beaten flat for the line, and the hook hardened by quenching it in water. The book also describes round lead weights, cork floats pierced by a quill and twelve artificial flies. Thomas Barker, in 1651, advised throwing blood and brewers' grains into the water to bring the fish together, and Izaak Walton told his readers to throw handfuls of boiled barley malt the evening before into the place where they meant to fish. Barker also describes a pike rod with a wire ring at the tip and a winder near the butt to let the line out and take it in, an early [fishing reel](/en/inventions/fishing-reel/). Silk and horsehair lines gave way to nylon after the Second World War. ## Key facts - Oldest known hooks: Sakitari Cave, Okinawa, about 23,000 years ago - Material of the Sakitari hooks: Ground shell of the Trochus sea snail - Bamboo rod and silk line: Book of Songs, China, Zhou period - First fishing book printed in England: Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, 1496 ## Requires - [Stone Tools](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/stone-tools/): The first cutting edge (3.3 million years ago) - [Rope & Cordage](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/rope/): Twisted fibres that hold the world (46,000 years ago) ## Leads to - [Fishing reel](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/fishing-reel/): Storing and winding line on a spool (c. 870) ## Sources - [Advanced maritime adaptation in the western Pacific coastal region extends back to 35,000–30,000 years before present (PNAS 113.40, 2016, pp. 11184–11189)](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1607857113), Masaki Fujita et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - [Early Fish Hooks Unearthed in Okinawa](https://archaeology.org/news/2016/09/19/160919-okinawa-fish-hooks/), Archaeology, Archaeological Institute of America (2016) - [Pelagic fishing at 42,000 years before the present and the maritime skills of modern humans (Science 334, 2011, pp. 1117–1121)](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1207703), Sue O'Connor, Rintaro Ono, Chris Clarkson, Science - [Gone fishing? We have for 42,000 years](https://phys.org/news/2011-11-prehistoric-mastered-deep-sea-fishing.html), Australian National University, via Phys.org (2011) - [Ancient Egyptian Fishing, in Harvard African Studies 1 (1917)](https://archive.org/details/harvardafricans01deptgoog), Oric Bates, Peabody Museum of Harvard University - [Fiona Haughey, PhD thesis, vol. 1, p. 73 (prehistoric bone fishhooks from Middle Egypt and el-Omari, after Brewer and Friedman 1989)](https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1460514/1/Fiona_Haughey_vol_1.pdf), University College London - [Fishing Rod, in How Products Are Made](https://www.encyclopedia.com/manufacturing/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/fishing-rod), Rose Secrest, Gale, via Encyclopedia.com - [詩經·衛風·竹竿 (Book of Songs, Odes of Wei, Bamboo Rods)](https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E8%A9%A9%E7%B6%93/%E7%AB%B9%E7%AB%BF), Wikisource (Chinese) - [詩經·召南·何彼襛矣 (Book of Songs, Odes of Shao, line on the silk fishing line)](https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/%E8%A9%A9%E7%B6%93/%E4%BD%95%E5%BD%BC%E8%A5%9B%E7%9F%A3), Wikisource (Chinese) - [Shijing 詩經, Book of Songs](http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Classics/shijing.html), Ulrich Theobald, ChinaKnowledge - [Homer, Odyssey 12.251–255, translated by A. T. Murray](https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136:book=12:card=234), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University - [Aelian, On the Characteristics of Animals 15.1, translated by A. F. Scholfield](https://www.attalus.org/translate/animals15.html), Attalus - [The First Words Ever Written on Fly Fishing](https://www.flyfisherman.com/editorial/first-words-ever-written-fly-fishing/453346), Fly Fisherman - [A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle (Wynkyn de Worde, Westminster, 1496), facsimile](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57943), Project Gutenberg - [Thomas Barker, The Art of Angling (1651)](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26116), Project Gutenberg - [Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/683), Project Gutenberg Fact-checked on 2026-10-18. --- The Last Codex · https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/fishing-rod-and-hook/ · © The Last Codex. Texts, plates and figures: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.