SUBSISTENCE
Dinner from the Sea
~164,000 years ago
Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Saalian glacial
In a sea cave at Pinnacle Point, on the southern tip of Africa, people were eating shellfish by about 164,000 years ago, the oldest known use of food from the sea. The world was then in a long and mostly glacial stage, much of Africa cooler and drier, and the cave's layers also hold worked pigment and small bladelet tools. Fires burned there across those millennia, leaving burnt hearth material spread through the deposits.
Why it matters
The coast may have been a refuge. When the interior dried out, the meeting of the rich Cape flora and productive coastal waters offered two food supplies that held steady through hard times: starchy bulbs and tubers, and beds of shellfish. Some researchers argue that this southern shoreline carried our species through one of the harshest phases of its history; at the very least, it shows people systematically adding a new world, the sea, to their menu.
Dating & uncertainty
The date is 164,000 +/- 12,000 years, from optically stimulated luminescence on the cave sediments. It marks the oldest evidence found so far, not the first meal: shellfish gathering may well be older, and the coastlines where it would have happened are mostly under the sea today.
Sources
- Marean et al. (2007), Nature · Early human use of marine resources and pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocenedoi:10.1038/nature06204
- Marean (2010), Journal of Human Evolution · Pinnacle Point Cave 13B (Western Cape Province, South Africa) in context: the Cape Floral kingdom, shellfish, and modern human originsdoi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2010.07.011
- Herries & Fisher (2010), Journal of Human Evolution · Multidimensional GIS modeling of magnetic mineralogy as a proxy for fire use and spatial patterning: evidence from the Middle Stone Age bearing sea cave of Pinnacle Point 13Bdoi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2010.07.012
Our species’ history as one day
11:30:1712 h 30 min before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day
See it on the timeline