Entering a Salmon Graveyard | The Great Human Race

Getting deeper, huh? 5,000 years ago in the Pacific Northwest, the seasonal salmon runs sustained huge populations of early humans. Oh, is that a dead fish? But this bounty was only available for a short window of time each year. Look, there's even skin everywhere on the bottom!

Missing the run could deprive an entire community of their main food source. This is a salmon graveyard; there are dead fish everywhere. Fish are floating downriver, fish are trapped in rocks. Look at that, it's huge! Fish, he's not that old. This could be really bad news; it is quite possible that Bill and I are too late.

No, these runs last for several weeks, so we still might have a shot. Look, do you see that? Yep, salmon take advantage of slower-moving water in these rivers and more constricted areas upstream. Salmon like to congregate in pools because they expend less energy maintaining their location in the river.

We can see the fish in the stream; they're everywhere and they're huge! Right there! Oh my god! But there's no way to catch these fish with our bare hands. We gotta come up with a better strategy. The only way Bill and I can truly take advantage of this resource is to recreate some of the basic technologies that people used 5,000 years ago to catch them and process them.