Archaeologists discover the world's oldest fishhooks in Okinawa

(Image credit: Chisoku/Getty Images)

last updated 17 September 2016

Scientists have found the oldest known fishhooks in the world on a tiny island in Japan's Okinawa archipelago, the site of a major U.S.-Japan battle in World War II, according to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

This find displaces another set of ancient fishhooks found in East Timor in 2011. The earlier discovery was dated between 16,000 and 23,000 years old, but carbon dating places the new hooks between 22,380 and 22,770 years of age.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.