Reconstructed setting· The columns of time

Seashore camp

200 ka → 75 ka

A southern African coast with dunes, thicket on the cliffs, and heaps of shells left by people who had added the sea to their diet.

What the evidence shows

The shell heaps are the point of the scene. By about 164,000 years ago, give or take 12,000, people at Pinnacle Point in South Africa were eating marine resources, the earliest secure evidence of the practice. The advantage is nutritional and strategic at once: a shore harvested at low tide is a food source that does not move, does not have to be chased, and does not fail in a drought. The dunes and the coastal thicket come from the same sites, the sand dated by luminescence, the vegetation reconstructed from phytoliths.

Bounds and conventions

The scene is drawn from a handful of exceptionally preserved sites on a single stretch of coast. Whether coastal foraging was widespread at this date or confined to a few favourable shores, the evidence cannot say: the coastlines of the period are now largely under water. So this is a documented shore, not a portrait of the age.

Sources

1. Richter, D. et al. (2017), Nature, doi:10.1038/nature22335
2. Marean, C. W. et al. (2007), Nature, doi:10.1038/nature06204
3. Henshilwood, C. S. et al. (2002), Science, doi:10.1126/science.1067575
4. Henshilwood, C. S., d'Errico, F., Watts, I. (2009), Journal of Human Evolution, doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.01.005
5. d'Errico, F. et al. (2005), Journal of Human Evolution, doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2004.09.002
6. Esteban, I., et al. (2020), Quaternary Science Reviews, doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2019.02.022. Résumé lu.
7. Herries, A. I. R. & Fisher, E. C. (2010), Journal of Human Evolution, doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2010.07.012
8. Bentsen, S. E. (2014), Journal of Archaeological Research, doi:10.1007/s10814-013-9069-x