Oldest seaside civilisation found in South Africa?: 19-10-2007
Researchers believe they may have discovered traces of the oldest coastal settlement of modern homo sapiens on cliffs in South Africa overlooking the Indian Ocean.
Pinnacle Point, near Mossel Bay on the popular Garden Route to the east of Cape Town, yielded evidence of 164,000-year-old artefacts, which indicates a seaside civilisation had settled much earlier than anthropologists had previously believed.
Publishing their findings in
Nature journal, researchers explained that they had found evidence that the humans included seafood as part of their diet, used relatively sophisticated tools and symbolic paints, and may even have employed rudimentary language.
"Generally speaking, coastal areas were of no use to early humans - unless they knew how to use the sea as a food source," said Dr Curtis Marean, a paleoanthropologist at Arizona State University.
"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."
The researchers believe that a small group of humans adapted to coastal life to survive the glacial period.
"It is possible that this population could be the progenitor population for all modern humans," Dr Marean said.
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