News Section | Evolution
‘Humankind’s mental tide turned between 164,000 and 120,000 yrs ago’
A recent study has indicated human evolution’s tide may have turned on lake and sea shores.
In a cave hugging South Africa’s lush southern coastline, Curtis Marean suspected that he had cornered a wily Stone Age crew that brought humans back from extinction’s brink – they found a coastal oasis near the bottom of the world spread its sheltering arms in the nick of time.
Marean proposed that it was there, where the Arizona State University archaeologist have now conducted excavations, that humankind’s mental tide turned sometime between 164,000 and 120,000 years ago.
Seaside survivors learned to read the moon’s phases in order to harvest heaps of shellfish — brain food extraordinaire — during a few precious days each month when ocean tides safely retreated.
Tantalizing traces of complex thinking and behaviours, including lunar literacy, have turned up at South Africa’s Pinnacle Point, a cave-specked promontory that juts into the Indian Ocean. Chunks of dark red pigment and strikingly beautiful seashells found by Marean’s team in one cave attest to ancient ritual activities. Stone points unearthed in the same cave sport glossy patches, signs that the rock was heated to make it easier to work with. The finds challenge the long-standing view that Stone Age people did not think abstractly and perform complex rituals until about 50,000 years ago.
“Our excavations may have intercepted ancient people who shadowed the shifting shoreline and are the ancestors of everyone on the planet,” Science now quoted Marean as saying.
Researchers argued that ancient menus focused heavily on food from lakes, rivers and oceans. New work pointed to lakeside fishing in East Africa nearly 2 million years ago, the shoreline shellfish harvesting among Homo sapiens at Pinnacle Point starting more than 160,000 years ago and sea voyages to Pacific Ocean islands by an unlikely group of New World settlers around 12,000 years ago.
Food scientists at the meeting emphasized that nutrients essential for brain growth are much more abundant in fish and shellfish than in red meat or any other food. And grabbing catfish out of shallow waters, not to mention scooping up handfuls of shellfish along the shore, may be far easier than hunting land animals or scaring predators away from meaty carcasses, says archaeologist Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon in Eugene.
Shellfish collecting and fishing probably began early among members of the Homo genus, Erlandson said.
“These foods later could have provided nutrients that enabled the evolution of fully modern brain size and cognition,” added Erlandson.
The findings were detailed at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, held in Minneapolis in April.
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