Egyptians farmed fish 3,500 years ago: study

Egyptians practised fish farming more than 3,500 years ago, according to a joint German-Israeli study released on Tuesday. Scientists studied 100 fish teeth found at archaeological sites across modern-day Israel to conclude they had been plucked from a lagoon in Egypt’s Sinai thousands of years ago.

“The sample of teeth covered a chronological period extending over 10,000 years, from the early Neolithic period through to the early Islamic period,” said a statement from Israel’s Haifa University, one of the participants in the study. Farmers at the time found a lagoon which fish were entering and barricaded it for a few months, Guy Bar-Oz, one of the authors of the report and archaeology professor at the University of Haifa.