Humans start eating the sea
Shellfish middens at Pinnacle Point show a new and reliable food source being exploited.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 35 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 15 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
Caves at Pinnacle Point on the South African coast contain shellfish remains, ochre and small bladelets from about 164,000 years ago — among the earliest evidence of systematic marine foraging. Shellfish are predictable, safe to gather and rich in the fatty acids that brain tissue requires. During the harsh MIS 6 glacial, when much of Africa was arid, the coast may have been one of the refugia in which small human populations survived.