Foraging for shellfish in a predictable and productive inter-tidal environment, the south coast of South Africa

Summary

The south coast of South Africa has the oldest and best studied evidence for early use of coastal resources, and various researchers have argued that coastal resource use was significant for cognition, social complexity, and the maintenance of population refugia. To date there has been little consensus on the foraging returns and sustainability for inter-tidal resources in this coastal environment. Here we present the first net return and regeneration rate estimates for inter-tidal foraging in the varied south coast of South Africa. Foraging experiments were conducted with Khoe-San descendants in the area and hourly caloric net return rates were recorded over 35 low tides and through the seasons. Net return rates varied as a function of gender, tidal range, marine habitat types and weather conditions. The mean net return rate (kcal/hour) in some instances equals or exceeds that recorded for hunting of large mammals, and shows that under the right conditions the south coast provides an extraordinarily rich protein resource. Our results show that strategic coastal foraging along the south coast could have been a highly predictable and productive foraging strategy for emerging modern humans. We relate these results to recent analyses and discussions of Middle Stone Age coastal foraging.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Building the hunter-gatherer’s paleoscape on the South African coast: Environment, landscape, and foraging resources   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage