Latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street
Journal:
Photo: Jon Erlandson
Last week archaeologists working on the Channel Islands of
California announced that they had found delicate stone tools of
remarkable antiquity-possibly as old as 13,000 years. These are
among the oldest artifacts ever discovered in North America. To
judge by the types of tool and bone, there was a people living
there who relied heavily on abalone, seals, cormorants, ducks and
fish for food.
This discovery fits a pattern. From the stone age to ancient
Greece to the Maya to modern Japan, the most technologically
advanced and economically successful human beings have often been
seafarers and fish-eaters-and they still are, as the latest tsunami
reminds us. Indeed, it may not be going too far to describe our
species as a maritime ape.
The oldest human site with evidence of symbolic culture and
sophisticated tools is a cave overlooking the sea at Pinnacle Point
in South Africa; it dates from 170,000 years ago. Piles of mussel
shells testify to the denizens' taste for seafood. Around 100,000
years later, another flowering of technology and culture occurred
at the Blombos caves further west.
African people subsequently expanded into Asia, and
anthropologists now think they did so at first primarily along the
shores of the Indian Ocean. The evidence for this "beachcomber
express" is chiefly genetic. Genes show that people reached the
Andaman islands, Melanesia and Australia, all of which required sea
crossings, within a few thousand years-whereas it took them tens of
thousands of years even to begin to oust our Neanderthal rivals
from Europe and inland Asia.
Further hints of maritime habits abound throughout the
prehistoric record, with rich old-stone-age cultures around the
Mediterranean, the Red Sea and in parts of Asia. The oldest known
Briton of a recognizably modern-human kind-29,000 years old-is the
skeleton of a man found in a cave overlooking the sea at Paviland
in Wales.
But there is a problem: Sea level is more than 200 feet higher
today than it was 15,000 years ago, having risen steadily once the
ice age loosened its grip on the continents. So the bulk of the
evidence of ancient coastal settlements must be buried beneath the
waves. What finds we have are fortuitous: At Pinnacle Point,
Blombos and Paviland, hospitable caves a steep climb up from the
sea must have tempted people to make a base higher than usual above
sea level.
For our ancestors, the shoreline provided a far richer source of
calories and protein than the interior of continents-once they had
acquired the skills and tools to exploit it. The richest and most
socially stratified cultures of hunter-gatherers in recent times
were consequently marine ones: the coastal tribes of Peru,
California, Oregon, British Columbia and some Pacific islands being
prime examples.
Supposing maritime human settlements usually achieved high
densities and high birth rates, then it would have been they who
gave rise to inland tribes rather than vice versa. Hence many of
us-however landlocked our more recent ancestors were-may ultimately
be descended from people who once lived off seafood and knew the
sea shore.
Does this explain our love of eating seafood, or the high
nutritional value that our bodies put on omega-3 fatty acids? Does
it explain our obsession with heading for the beach when on
vacation?
Back in the 1960s, in order to understand our hairless bodies,
upright stance and subcutaneous fat, a British marine biologist
named Alister Hardy first floated the idea of an ancestral human
species having gone through a wholly aquatic phase. That probably
goes too far-the dates are wrong-but there could yet be a germ of
truth in it if some modern human traits were honed, more recently,
at least partly by life on the ocean shore.
