What Is the Oldest Evidence of Ice Fishing?

Nearly 2 million people in the United States go ice fishing every winter. For most, it’s a chance to get outside and enjoy time with friends. But long before ice fishing was a recreational hobby, it was a critical means of survival for people living in Arctic and subarctic regions around the world.

How long have humans been ice fishing? There isn't a lot of hard archaeological evidence, but there are some intriguing clues to its ancient origins passed down through Indigenous and traditional cultures.

In 1914, a farmer in Antrea, Finland (now Russia), made a remarkable discovery while digging a ditch in a swampy bog. It was a fragment of knotted rope encased in mud more than three feet below the surface. The rope looked a lot like the nets that local fishermen used to catch salmon and northern pike, but why was it buried in the middle of his field?

It's because the "Antrea Net Find," as archaeologists now call it, was nearly 10,000 years old. Woven from willow fibers, the net measured nearly 100 feet long with a 2.3-inch mesh. Other artifacts found nearby—stone weights, wooden floats, bone tools and hunting weapons—were likely deposited on the bottom of an ancient lakebed when a Stone Age fisherman’s dugout canoe capsized.

Dating between 8,600 and 8,400 B.C., the Antrea Net is the oldest fishing net in the world, but is it also the oldest evidence of ice fishing?

In North Karelia, the subarctic region between Finland and Russia where the net was found, ice fishing has always been critical for survival during the long, dark winter.

“Winter-based fishing, including winter seining, has been the survival and food security choice that has enabled human societies—both Indigenous peoples and local communities like ours—to live through the long boreal winter,” says Tero Mustonen, a Finnish scientist who also practices a traditional ice fishing method called winter seining.

Winter seining involves cutting big rectangular holes in the lake ice and using long wooden poles to manipulate a large net under the ice, which is then pulled to the surface by hand. The nets used for winter seining need to have a tight mesh because they’re designed to catch small schooling fish. A single net can haul in hundreds of pounds of fish.

The Antrea Net may have been used for winter seining, but its mesh is a little too wide for schooling fish. That doesn’t mean ancient fishermen in North Karelia didn’t have a whole suite of nets and tools for fishing year-round, says Mustonen.

“Any fisherman who was capable of producing [the Antrea Net] technology—the mesh and the knots—was fully capable of producing a smaller seine,” says Mustonen, president of Snowchange Cooperative. “We know that most likely the person who was fishing with the Antrea Net from a dugout boat is part of a long continuum where the same mesh nets and harvesting sites would have been used for 10,000 years.”

Even if the Antrea Net itself wasn’t used for ice fishing, there are clues from traditional Finnish culture that winter seining has been practiced in Finland for at least 4,000 to 5,000 years. That’s the approximate age of one of Finland’s oldest rune songs—epic oral poetry sung in a Finno-Ugric language—that tells the story of the creation of fire.

The rune song, called Tulen synty, says that a spark of fire fell from the heavens into a lake, where it was swallowed by a whitefish, which was itself swallowed by a pike, then a lake trout and finally a salmon. The people fashioned a seining net and cast it into the lake, pulling with all their strength until they retrieved the salmon and inside it, the gift of fire.

Another clue to the ancient origins of winter seining is contained in the place names used for popular “pulling” sites on the ice, known as apajas. Mustonen says there are more than 380 named apajas on Lake Puruvesi, where he fishes. Each place name—known as a “hydronym”—communicates vital information about how and when each particular spot in the ice should be fished.

“Some sites you can pull every day, while others are limited to once a week,” says Mustonen. “There are sites you only pull on a full moon, and others that are more productive in the early winter than closer to spring.”

Linguists believe that some of the apaja place names date back to prehistoric times. That’s how ice fishermen in North Karelia have been able to preserve traditional knowledge that has been lost in many other fisheries.

As early as the 1300s, there are written records of winter seining in North Karelia. The region was ruled by Swedish kings at the time, who kept tax records about the size of the winter seining harvests in Finland.

The ancient practice of winter seining was not restricted to North Karelia or even the European subarctic. Native Americans living in the Great Lakes region used a strikingly similar method to pull fish from beneath the ice.

In 1615, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain described the ice fishing techniques of the Huron living near Georgian Bay in modern-day Ontario: “They made several round holes in the ice, and that through which they are to draw the seine is some five feet long and three feet wide... [T]hey fasten [the net] to a wooden pole six or seven feet long, and place it under the ice, and pass this pole from hole to hole.”

The Ojibwe of the upper Great Lakes also fished under the ice with nets, but were equally skilled with spears, traps and hooks. A favorite traditional ice-fishing method, still practiced among the Ojibwe, is to cut a hole in the ice and build a small tipi around it made from pine boughs covered in animal skins.

“You want it to be nice and dark in there,” says Teresa Mitchell, director of the George W. Brown Jr. Ojibwe Museum and Cultural Center. “On a nice sunny day, the hole in the ice lights up underneath you like a TV screen. You can see very clearly and spot the fish coming and going.”

Ojibwe fishermen lie on their stomachs and dangle a decoy into the water. Traditionally carved from wood or antlers, the decoy doesn’t have any hooks or barbs. It’s intended to lure a big fish into the hole, which the fisherman then attempts to spear in the back of its head.

Mitchell says that ice fishing with spears “has always been something that our people have done,” but there isn’t a landmark archaeological find like the Antrea Net to put an early date on ice fishing in the Great Lakes region. Archaeologists believe that spear fishing in North America developed during the Late Archaic period (3000 B.C. to 1000 B.C.) and that nets started to be used in the Middle Woodland period (200 B.C. to A.D. 300).

Humans moved into the Great Lakes region after the last glaciers receded between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago. The abundant fish of the Great Lakes provided daily sustenance year-round and were one of the only reliable food sources during the winter.

“If we look at our colleagues in the Inuit societies in Canada or Alaska, we know that traditional winter harvesting [hunting] is very time-consuming and uncertain,” says Mustonen. “When farming is not an option in these latitudes, fishing is the only stable guarantee until spring arrives.”