Yet another in a seemingly never-ending stream of articles that claim a 'first' or 'oldest' in the story of human evolution, and like its predecessors, this story's attached set of conclusions has about as many holes as the combined nets of the entire North Sea fishing fleet; what is undoubtedly a very interesting discovery has been misinterpreted and vastly over-hyped, but such is the world of the popular Press.
First to the details of the find by Curtis Marean, a palaeoanthropologist with the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University and three graduate students in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change., as reported in Science Daily...
Evidence of early humans living on the coast in South Africa, harvesting food from the sea, employing complex bladelet tools and using red pigments in symbolic behavior 164,000 years ago, far earlier than previously documented, is being reported in the journal Nature.
The Tan-Tan figurine, covered in red ochre and dating to 400,000 bp, as described by Robert Bednarik, is comfortably older than this discovery, and there are other indications from ochre mines that symbolic behaviour was in evidence hundreds of thousands of years before Pinnacle Point.
In seeking the "perfect site" to explore, Marean analyzed ocean currents, climate data, geological formations and other data to pin down a location where he felt sure to find one of these progenitor populations: the Cape of South Africa at Pinnacle Point."It was important that we knew exactly where to look and what we were looking for," says Marean. This type of research is expensive and funding is competitive. Marean and the team of scientists who set out to Pinnacle Point to search for this elusive population, did so with the help of a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation's Human Origins: Moving in New Directions (HOMINID) program.
I suppose if one is trying to justify a $2.5 million grant, it's important to cast one's discoveries in the best possible light, but simply ignoring previous discoveries in order to make misleading claims of 'first' or' oldest', isn't in my opinion, the way to go - for example...
"Generally speaking, coastal areas were of no use to early humans -- unless they knew how to use the sea as a food source" says Marean. "For millions of years, our earliest hunter-gatherer relatives only ate terrestrial plants and animals. Shellfish was one of the last additions to the human diet before domesticated plants and animals were introduced."Before, the earliest evidence for human use of marine resources and coastal habitats was dated about 125,000 years ago. "Our research shows that humans started doing this at least 40,000 years earlier. This could have very well been a response to the extreme environmental conditions they were experiencing," he says.
The first paragraph makes no sense at all - coastal environments would in my opinion have been particularly attractive to early humans - abundant food resources, in the guise of shell-fish, crustaceans etc. would have provided plenty of protein, and plant foods such as kelp may also have been available. Archaic humans would likely have been just as adept at exploiting marine resources as their later descendants, and is somewhat unfortunate that many of the beach locations that could have been occupied by early humans have been sunk below the waves for as much as 12,000 years - thus we are seeing only a fraction of the picture when we consider inland sites only.
As these are food resources that require gathering rather than hunting, it would have made sense to live a life with as many reduced dangers as possible, in which occasional forays could have been made inland in search of meat on the hoof, as well as other plant foods and resources. Locations where fresh-water rivers emptied out into the ocean would have made ideal sites for hunting prey animals, although of course, early, and presumably unarmed humans would have been in just as much danger as other prey animals that came to drink from the freshwater sites.
But the main point is that coastal regions that could have been home to early humans are for the most part drowned beneath the sea, victims of rising sea-levels since the end of the Pleistocene, and it could be for that reason that we see what appears to be so little evidence for humans in coastal regions.
"Coastlines generally make great migration routes," Marean says. "Knowing how to exploit the sea for food meant these early humans could now use coastlines as productive home ranges and move long distances."
Results reporting early use of coastlines are especially significant to scientists interested in the migration of humans out of Africa. Physical evidence that this coastal population was practising modern human behaviour is particularly important to geneticists and physical anthropologists seeking to identify the progenitor population for modern humans."
The first point is well made, and could equally have applied to humans living on those now-submerged coastlines, whom for all we know were engaging in what are referred to as 'modern traits' far earlier than the current archaeological record might suggest.
"This evidence shows that Africa, and particularly southern Africa, was precocious in the development of modern human biology and behaviour. We believe that on the far southern shore of Africa there was a small population of modern humans who struggled through this glacial period using shellfish and advanced technologies, and symbolism was important to their social relations. It is possible that this population could be the progenitor population for all modern humans," Marean says.
Possible yes, but not very likely - if he was considering modern humans in an anatomical context, rather than a symbolic one, I'd agree there was an outside possibility that humans today are descended from one or another African individuals from 164,000 bp.
It must be tempting to emphasise the importance of one's own discoveries as much as possible, especially when you've just spent $2.5 million of someone else's cash, but ignoring the fact that 10 million square miles of land disappeared across the world as the result of the Great Melt at the beginning of the Holocene can only skew the picture - we have no idea how densely coastal regions might have been populated, or whether indeed the majority of people back then and before chose to live by the sea - although of course, it's even more difficult to get funding for submerged offshore sites that cannot be easily surveyed beforehand - however it is from such environments that we might ultimately make our biggest discoveries yet of early modern human behaviours, assuming that archaeology can be recovered intact.
Here's a final word from Curtis Marean...
"Archaeologists have had a hard time finding material residues of these earliest modern humans," Marean says. "The world was in a glacial stage 125,000 to 195,000 years ago, and much of Africa was dry to mostly desert; in many areas food would have been difficult to acquire. The paleoenvironmental data indicate there are only five or six places in all of Africa where humans could have survived these harsh conditions."
Unless of course, people in large numbers were already living by the coast, and were therefore more or less immune to the arid period of the Middle Palaeolithic described here. But despite my lack of enthusiasm for the conclusions drawn by the researchers, this is still a very exciting find, and even if it doesn't re-write prehistory as the authors would have us believe, it does at the very least, help fill in the odd blank page here and there.
see also: NYT - Key Human Traits Tied to Shellfish Remains
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