SUBSISTENCE
Pinnacle Point: First Seafood
~164,000 years ago
Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Saalian glacial
On the South African coast, people were eating shellfish and using pigment about 164,000 years ago, the earliest known use of the sea for food.
Pinnacle Point is a complex of sea caves on the southern coast of South Africa, near Mossel Bay in the Western Cape province. Cave PP13B has yielded, in levels dated to approximately 164,000 years ago, remains of marine shellfish, worked pigment and small bladelet tools, together with hearth residues distributed throughout the sequence. These remains constitute the oldest known evidence of human exploitation of marine food resources. The occupation falls within Marine Isotope Stage 6, one of the numbered phases that geologists read from the chemical composition of the ocean floor, even numbers denoting the cold ones: during this predominantly glacial stage, much of Africa experienced a colder and drier climate.
Why it matters
The occupations gave rise to what is known as the coastal refuge hypothesis. Under this hypothesis, the combination of the Cape flora, rich in bulb- and tuber-bearing plants, and highly productive coastal waters would have provided two stable food resources at a time when the interior of the continent was drying out. Their stability follows from what they are: a bulb holds a reserve of starch underground and remains available out of season, while a shellfish bed occupies a fixed position and is uncovered at every low tide, making it predictable in space and in time, unlike game. Several authors regard this shoreline as the setting that allowed Homo sapiens to survive one of the most unfavourable climatic phases in its history; the interpretation remains debated. Independently of it, the site documents the regular incorporation of marine resources into the human diet, alongside the contemporaneous use of pigments and of a bladelet industry.
Dating & uncertainty
The dating rests on optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) applied to the cave sediments, which places the relevant levels at 164,000 ± 12,000 years. The method dates the sand itself rather than anything in it. The principle is as follows: natural radioactivity in the ground slowly imparts energy to buried quartz grains, which retain it for as long as they remain in darkness, and light releases it. A grain exposed to daylight is thereby reset at the moment of its burial; illuminating it in the laboratory yields the energy accumulated since, and the quantity measures the duration of burial. The resulting age corresponds to the oldest known evidence, and not necessarily to the beginning of the practice: the shorelines contemporaneous with these occupations are now submerged, following the postglacial rise in sea level, which precludes inferring from the absence of older sites the absence of the practice itself.
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