Reconstructed setting· The columns of time

Seashore camp

200 ka → 75 ka

This backdrop shows a southern African shore, with its dunes, cliff plants and the shell middens of people who had added the sea to their diet.

Backdrop representing a southern African coast with its dunes, cliff vegetation and the shell middens left by populations that had incorporated marine resources into their diet.

What the evidence shows

The shell middens constitute the subject of the composition. At Pinnacle Point, in South Africa, the consumption of marine resources is attested 164,000 years ago, with an uncertainty of 12,000 years: it is the oldest secure evidence of the practice. Its interest is nutritional and logistical: a shore exploited at low tide constitutes a fixed resource, requiring no pursuit and remaining available in periods of drought. The dunes and cliff vegetation come from the same sites, the sand having been dated by luminescence and the plant cover reconstructed from phytoliths, siliceous microfossils formed in plant tissues and preserved in sediments.

Bounds and conventions

The composition proceeds from a small number of exceptionally preserved sites on a single stretch of coast. The data do not establish whether coastal gathering was widespread at that date or limited to a few favourable shores, the coastlines of the period being today largely submerged. The backdrop therefore represents a documented shore and not the general state of a period.