john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

shellfish

  • Mailbag: Humans are predators

    Tue, 2011-09-20 11:42 -- John Hawks

    Re: Shellfish

    I have been following your weblog for a while and just read your weblog on shellfish diet of early hominines. Interesting.

    I have a little question that you – hopefully – may be prepared to answer:

    Anthropologists describe our ancestors often as “hunters and gatherers”.

    You do that too in your blog. Actually, you do that quite often. It is obviously a valid paradigm.

    Humans are often further characterized as “Predators” which I consider a strange term for primates.

    Well, I see an abundance of evidence – including your blog entry above – that contradicts this characterization.

    I do not see much evidence that supports it.

    Actually, I do not know of any supporting evidence at all.

    The commonly named observations, scratched bones and hunting chimps, only verify that some bones have been scratched (by humans or natural processes?) and that chimps can spend their lives successfully as hunters as long as scientists with Doctor’s cases stand nearby to help them survive the risks of otherwise deadly infections.

    I saw that the diet question is your topic as a scientist.

    So, you may have strong evidence?

    I wonder if this is a confusion of language? A predator is an animal that kills and eats other animals. Any hunter is by definition a predator.

    That does not preclude other means of subsistence or other trophic relationships with different species. Humans were predators from at least 2.5 million years ago, but they were also prey animals of lions, sabretooths and hyenas for most of that time.

    I see your reference to chimpanzee hunting. Chimpanzees hunt in every population where they have been observed in the wild, and new field sites have invariably found them already hunting. There is no need for doctors among them. Many primates are predators, it is not strange at all. Small nocturnal primates obtain most of their caloric requirements from predation of insects and other small animals.

    Tags: 
    diet
    predation
    shellfish
    hunting

  • Shellfish gathering, paleoanthropological strawman

    Sun, 2011-09-18 15:26 -- John Hawks

    We have known for many years that Lower Paleolithic people were using shellfish, fish, and littoral resources at sites across the Old World, from Trinil [1], Koobi Fora [2], Gesher Benot Ya'aqov [3], and elsewhere. I've discussed the evidence several times (maybe most usefully in "The shells of Trinil"). As I wrote last year ("Fishy story at Koobi Fora"):

    Aquatic animals aren't important because of their sheer numbers, but because they tell us about the flexibility of foraging behavior. Living hunter-gatherers eat turtles and reptiles when they can, and because they are usually small food packages, they often eat them where they find them instead of returning to a base camp first. Hunter-gatherers are flexible in what they eat and where they eat it. FwJj20 is showing at least a substantial taxonomic flexibility in the meat-eating of early Oldowan hunters.

    So why do we keep seeing stories that make shellfish consumption look like news when it's done by Neandertals, MSA Africans, or anybody else?

    I'm writing about this today because of a new paper in PLoS ONE by Miguel Cortés-Sánchez and colleagues, reporting on the shellfish remains in Bajondillo Cave, Spain [4].

    Shellfish collecting has been well characterized in some Mousterian contexts. Mary Stiner treated it systematically in her 1993 monograph, Honor Among Thieves, which is part of the graduate education of most young Paleolithic archaeologists. Stiner spent a lot of text quantifying shellfish use and gave a good discussion of the biases that make archaeologists find less evidence of shellfish consumption than there probably was.

    Most important, when you can walk along a shoreline and nosh shells, you're not very likely to haul many of them back to a cave several kilometers from the shore. In the Holocene, we find lots of archaeological localities where people were systematically collecting many shells and cooking them for large groups. For this purpose, the people carried baskets or sacks of shellfish for a good distance, and after they were consumed, the shells sometimes built up into large trash piles, or middens. We don't see shell middens in Mousterian or MSA contexts, but then we see very little of that kind of behavior with any kind of resources in MSA or Mousterian times. Here's what I wrote in 2008 ("Neandertal diet was not dolphin safe"):

    [I]t was hard to understand the excitement that accompanied last year's paper by Curtis Marean and colleagues (2007), who found evidence for shellfish exploitation at Pinnacle Point, South Africa. The press reported the result as if there were a shell midden, with abundant evidence for consumption. But actually the number of shells is fairly small -- all the shells from all the layers reported weigh less than a kilogram. That looks similar to the pattern of exploitation that Stiner had reported for the Neandertals at Moscarini, and more or less like the pattern at Vanguard and Gorham's Caves.

    The African MSA-era site with the most direct evidence of shellfish exploitation is at Abdur, Eritrea, where the stone tools are found in an ancient shore terrace, presumably at the very place where shellfish exploitation was happening [5]. That paper hinted at even earlier sites with similar evidence from Acheulean contexts along the Red Sea rift, where subsidence of the rift floor has left some ancient coral reefs exposed, Acheulean tools embedded within them. I should also point out indirect evidence on the basis of species abundance for human exploitation of giant clams in the Red Sea ("The ancient struggle for existence between humans and giant clams").

    In other words, archaeologists have found quite a lot of evidence of coastal resource use by early people, despite the steep biases against it. In the case of aquatic animal exploitation, they've got it as early as the Oldowan, 1.95 million years ago [2].

    Cortés-Sánchez and colleagues [4] add detail to this record but don't really broaden the picture. Mousterian shellfish acquisition around 150,000 years ago, well before the last interglacial, is earlier than many well-known instances of MSA shellfish utilization. But we know that much earlier humans were using these coastal resources, so it's hardly news. As at other sites, the mollusc remains are not very dense: a minimum of 16 shells in one layer, 66 shells in another, 80 in a third. If I were going to make a story out of it, I would direct more attention to the pearl, first I've ever heard of in a Neandertal site.

    More important is the paper's demonstration that humans actually processed the shells. Cortés-Sánchez and colleagues contrast the condition of continental and marine molluscs in the same levels, to show the systematic breakage and burning of the marine species:

    [A]lmost all of the marine mollusks exhibit intensive mechanical fracturing, with sharp edges on their shells suggestive of an absence of post-depositional transport, and very few appear complete (i.e., barely 7% at Bj19). Such fracturing, coupled with the absence of shells eroded by water, indicates that the marine mollusks from Bajondillo Cave, and in particular those from Bj19 do not represent “background fauna” from the nearby beach, a phenomenon that has recurrently caused problems in the association of early Middle Paleolithic shellfish deposits from the Mediterranean with paleo-human activities. In addition, a substantial percentage of the mussels exhibit burning marks (Figure 4: 1–6). These are recorded on 48% of the adult specimens from Bj19, the young mussels never exhibiting such traces. Thermo-alterations suggest consumption rather than passive burning, given that in most cases only the outer portions of the shells appear carbonized and/or flaked. An indirect line of evidence supporting this same hypothesis is provided by five of the epibiont barnacle remains that fire not only detached from the mussel shells but that in that process were thoroughly carbonized, as is the case of the four specimens from Bj18 (Figure 4: 8,11) or else calcined, as happens with the specimen from Bj19 (Figure 4: 12).

    I appreciate the paper's list of 24 previously-published Neandertal sites that present mollusc remains. It would be useful to compile a broader list including MSA sites. Personally, I hope to never read again a headline about how surprising or significant was shellfish use by early humans.

    References

    1. Joordens JCA, Wesselingh FP, de Vos J, Vonhof HB, Kroon D. Relevance of aquatic environments for hominins: a case study from Trinil (Java, Indonesia). Journal of Human Evolution. 2009;57(6):656-71.
    2. Braun DR, Harris JWK, Levin NE, McCoy JT, Herries AIR, Bamford MK, Bishop LC, Richmond BG, Kibunjia M. Early hominin diet included diverse terrestrial and aquatic animals 1.95 Ma in East Turkana, Kenya. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2010;107(22):10002-7.
    3. Alperson-Afil N, Sharon G, Kislev M, Melamed Y, Zohar I, Ashkenazi S, Rabinovich R, Biton R, Werker E, Hartman G, et al. Spatial Organization of Hominin Activities at Gesher Benot Ya'aqov, Israel. Science [Internet]. 2009;326:1677–1680. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1180695
    4. Cortés-Sánchez M, Muñiz A, Simón-Vallejo ía D, Lozano-Francisco ía C, Vera-Peláez JL, Finlayson C, Rodríguez-Vidal J, Delgado-Huertas A, Jiménez-Espejo FJ, Martínez-Ruiz F, et al. Earliest Known Use of Marine Resources by Neanderthals Lalueza-Fox C. PLoS ONE. 2011;6(9):e24026.
    5. Walter RC, Buffler RT, Bruggemann JH, Guillaume MM, Berhe SM, Negassi B, Libsekal Y, Cheng H, Edwards RL, von Cosel R, et al. Early human occupation of the Red Sea coast of Eritrea during the last interglacial. Nature. 2000;405(6782):65-9.
    Tags: 
    shellfish
    diet
    Neandertals
    Middle Paleolithic
    Mousterian
    MSA
    modern
    behavior
    foraging
    aquatic resources
    Synopsis: 
    Why do archaeologists always make shellfish gathering sound like news, when we know it's not surprising?

  • Neandertal diet was not dolphin-safe

    Mon, 2008-09-22 22:57 -- John Hawks

    Chris Stringer and colleagues (including Finlayson and Barton) have a paper in the current PNAS early bin describing Neandertal exploitation of marine mammals in the Gibraltar caves (Vanguard and Gorham's). The Neandertals left some seals and dolphin bones with cutmarks behind, along with a lot of mollusk shells.

    When I pulled up the paper, it sounded very familiar to me, like I'd written about it before. And indeed, I had, although I hadn't posted the results. A couple of years ago I was doing some research on the Gibraltar caves and I ran across a website from Oxford covering the Gibraltar excavations. The page (at the time) included this passage:

    As a result of the research project, we have been able to compare and contrast the distinct records of these caves to show that Middle Palaeolithic Neanderthals in Mediterranean-type environments occupied relatively small home ranges, that they focused on local estuarine wetland and marine habitats and had a highly omnivorous diet. This is revealed in exceptionally well-preserved occupation levels, by the presence of plant foods and shellfish, and cut-marked bones of small (e.g. tortoise, bird, rabbit) and large (red deer, ibex) vertebrates. Vanguard cave has also revealed the first evidence of Neanderthal processing of marine mammals, and this very important finding is the subject of a paper now being prepared for Science.

    That sounded pretty interesting, so I filed it away and did some more reading about marine resource exploitation.

    It's often hard to explain to people why it takes so long for us to learn new things about Neandertals, and why it's so exciting that today's genetic information is progressing so rapidly. This sequence of marine exploitation from Neandertals is a good example. Stiner (1993:191ff) documented shellfish remains in the Middle Paleolithic strata of Moscerini Cave, Latium, Italy. One of the interesting elements of the Moscerini shellfish remains was a fluctuation over time between two kinds of shellfish: mussels and smooth-shelled sand clams. These two kinds of bivalves live on different substrates -- mussels attach to rock, while sand clams, well, bury themselves in sand. Distinct pulses of alternating mussel and sand clam remains occurred in the site, and Stiner interpreted these as a consequence of local abundance of these different bivalves, which may have changed over time due to local sedimentation, sea levels, or other hydrological factors.

    But this fluctuation raised a point about the Neandertals: they weren't carrying the clams or mussels very far. They left in the cave a small fraction of the species variety of shellfish in the environment; the two kinds of bivalves are approximately equivalent in calories and nutritional yield.

    Their choices of which shellfish to bring into Moscerini appear to have been guided foremost by locational convenience: one kind of shellfish patch, on rock or in sand, may have been closer to the cave entrance at any given time in the past. The case of Moscerini, contrasted with the lack of much evidence for shellfish exploitation at neighboring Mousterian caves only slightly farther inland, indeed suggests the influence of this simple energetic principle. Assuming that transport distance is generally limited by the relatively low caloric yield of these bivalves, regardless of substrate source, hominids may have been willing to carry the shellfish to shelter only from the closest patches before eating them. Otherwise, hominids might have preferred to eat the shellfish where they found them (Stiner 1993:191).

    So far, so good -- Stiner documented something very interesting about the way that Neandertals exploited marine resources, and that might tell us about Neandertal foraging patterns more generally.

    In the face of that old result, it was hard to understand the excitement that accompanied last year's paper by Curtis Marean and colleagues (2007), who found evidence for shellfish exploitation at Pinnacle Point, South Africa. The press reported the result as if there were a shell midden, with abundant evidence for consumption. But actually the number of shells is fairly small -- all the shells from all the layers reported weigh less than a kilogram. That looks similar to the pattern of exploitation that Stiner had reported for the Neandertals at Moscarini, and more or less like the pattern at Vanguard and Gorham's Caves.

    Into this context comes the evidence of marine exploitation from Gibraltar. The marine mammals showed up in the faunal list of Finlayson et al. (2006), which along with the web material means that there are no surprises here. But the progression of this story has built upon several recent papers that have placed marine exploitation squarely in the the Pinnacle Point paper, as well as year's giant clam paper and the earlier research by Walter et al. (2000) in Eritrea. That paper included this quote:

    Regardless of which hominid species made the tools at Abdur, or at the more tenuously dated sites in South Africa, the pressing question is: what caused such an apparently sudden and widespread coastal marine adaptation by early humans by the last interglacial period? Climate changes leading to hyper-arid conditions in Africa and the Red Sea basin during the penultimate glaciation (150 kyr) and at the peak of the last interglacial may have been severe enough to pressure early humans to migrate from once stable interior habitats to exploit coastal marine habitats for survival. As opposed to shrinking freshwater environments during these times (for example, East African rivers and lakes), human adaptation to marine shoreline environments might have been further influenced by the lack of competition from other terrestrial mammals for coastal marine food resources. It is likely, however, that during extreme hyper-arid conditions marking the peak of the penultimate glaciation, that the Red Sea basin itself was virtually uninhabitable (Walter et al. 2000:69).

    So obviously we need a reminder that Neandertals shared the same marine exploitation patterns as early modern humans. Now Stringer et al. (2008) have provided it: Neandertals were like Africans in that they exploited marine resources. The systematic exploitation at Abdur may be beyond that present at any Neandertal site, but that goes to a question of motives and foraging patterns, certainly not the recognition of marine resources as useful foods. And we must not forget that most of the Pleistocene coast is now far underwater. If people tended to forage according to the Neandertal pattern, not carrying their shellfish far from the point of acquisition, then we should never expect to find evidence of any marine exploitation where the ancient coast was further from a short distance from the present coast. Littoral ecosystems may have been highly valuable to all these ancient humans.

    This story parallels the pace of discovery about pigment use. Pinnacle Point is mainly notable for its pigment blocks:

    There are 57 pigment pieces (93.4 g total) and most are from the LC-MSA Lower. Forty-six are iron-rich fine-grained sedimentary materials, and most have a pinkish-brown or reddish-brown surface colour. Streak colour (Natural Colour System) shows the majority (n = 31) as intermediate reddish-brown, followed by saturated reddish-brown (n = 10), and saturated very red (n = 7, high chroma values and 75% redness). All can be classified as 'red ochre'. Ten pieces were definitely used (eight ground and two scraped) and two pieces were probably used (both ground). Most ground pieces are moderately to intensively ground on one principal surface (Fig. 2). Saturated very-red values are disproportionately represented among used pieces, suggesting preferential use of the reddest, most chromatic ochre (Supplementary Information) (Marean et al. 2007:906).

    But as I discussed earlier this summer, there is now clear evidence that Neandertals used pigment crayons. The numbers at Pech de l'Azé are much more extensive (although later) than the Pinnacle Point remains. Again, the evidence is that Middle Paleolithic Neandertals did the same things as MSA Africans.

    In a commentary accompanying Stringer et al. (2008), Pat Shipman points out the message of behavioral similarity:

    Thus, these excavations have yielded excellent evidence of four behaviors usually cited as hallmarks of modern human behavior: the exploitation of a wide range of terrestrial resources; the exploitation of marine resources; the use of small scale resources; and seasonality or scheduling in the use of resources (11-13). That modern human subsistence behaviors would show up among
    archaic humans like Neanderthals, even as late as 28,000 B.P., is startling.

    ...

    If behavior did not separate "us" (modern humans) from "them" (Neanderthals), what did? Why did Neanderthals go extinct if they and modern humans used similar subsistence strategies in Gibraltar? Answers to these questions are likely to be elusive. But more research into carefully chosen, meticulously excavated, and thoughtfully analyzed sites may be one way to begin to find them (Shipman 2008:14242).

    It is the theme of current research: "behavioral modernity" appeared piecewise in Late Pleistocene humans, including the Neandertals.

    References:

    Barton RNE, Currant AP, Fernandez-Jalvo Y, Finlayson JC

    Finlayson C, and 25 others. 2006. Late survival of Neanderthals at the southernmost extreme of Europe. Nature 443:850-853. doi : 10.1038/nature05195

    Marean CW and 13 others. 2007. Early human use of marine resources and pigment in South Africa during the Middle Pleistocene. Nature 449:905-908. doi:10.1038/nature06204

    Scholz CA and 18 others. 2007. East African megadroughts between 135 and 75 thousand years ago and bearing on modern human origins. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 104:16416-16421. doi:10.1073/pnas.0703874104

    Shipman P. 2008. Separating "us" from "them": Neanderthal and modern human behavior. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 105:14241-14242. doi:10.1073/pnas.0807931105

    Stringer CB, Finlayson JC, Barton RNE, Fernández-Jalvo Y, Cáceres I, Sabin RC, Rhodes EJ, Currant AP, Rodríuez-Vidal J, Giles-Pacheco F, Riquelme-Cantal JA. 2008. Neanderthal exploitation of marine mammals in Gibraltar. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA 105:14319-14324. doi:10.1073/pnas.0805474105

    Stringer C. 2002. New perspectives on the Neanderthals. Evol Anthropol Suppl 1:58-59. DOI link

    Walter RC and 11 others. 2000. Early human occupation of the Red Sea coast of Eritrea during the last interglacial. Nature 405:65-69. doi:10.1038/35011048

    Tags: 
    hunting
    shellfish
    diet
    Neandertals

  • Shellfish use by Neandertals

    Sun, 2006-09-10 00:08 -- John Hawks

    I got the Neanderthals on the Edge volume by interlibrary loan to follow up the Barton shellfish consumption reference. Here is the relevant passage from the discussion of that chapter:

    Until recently any discussion of shellfish exploitation by Neanderthals or other archaic humans would have been restricted to just a few exceptional examples. However, following publication of work on the Italian Mousterian by Mary Stiner and others, there are now a growing number of instances where evidence has been documented for deliberate harvesting of marine shellfish resources by Neanderthals. These include cave sites and rockshelters in the Ligurian Riviera (Costa dei Balzi Rossi, Riparo Mochi, Barma Grande), further south in Latium (Grotta dei Moscerini) and in the southern Italian province of Puglia (Grotta dell'Alto, Grotta del Cavallo, Grotta Uluzzo C, Grotta Mario Bernadini, Grotta dei Giganti) (Stiner 1994, fig 6.9). Further afield in Africa similar occurrences have been reported from Middle Stone Age deposits at Blombos Cave in the southern Cape (Henshilwood and Sealy 1997) and at the Haua Fteah in Cyrenaica (Klein and Scott 1986). To these can now be added the localities of Vanguard and Gorham's Caves and the Devil's Tower, Gibraltar. The Gibraltar examples indicate that mussels and otehr shellfish probably contributed regularly to the Neanderthal diet. Furthermore they show that selective use was made of the larger shells collected from estuarine habitats and these small packages of food were carried up to four kilometres to the caves to be prepared and consumed. Much larger accumulations of shellfish in association with the Mousterian deposits are also known from unpublished sites north of Gibraltar near Torrelmolinos, in teh Spanish Costa del Sol (Miguel Cortés Sánchez pers. comm.).

    The presence of thin in situ ashy hearth horizons in Vanguard Cave has helped establish that the use of the site by Neanderthals was generally episodic with individual occupation events usually being short-lived. Ephemeral use of this cave is exemplified by the upper hearth and midden which probably represented a single episode of use of no more than a few hours duration. Further down the sequence more intensive evidence of occupation is indicated by accumulations of butchered bones of ibex and red deer but here too the data are consistent with short-term occupational use. In both the upper and middle section of this cave it was noticeable that te hearths were positioned in proximity of hte soutehrn cave wall. Similar juxtapositions have been noted at other Mousterian sites (e.g. Tor Faraj, south Jordan; Henry 1998), but unlike Tor Faraj there is no suggestion of multiple individually spaced hearths. Indeed it is noreworthy that the single hearth in the middle section of Vanguard was re-used at least three times. This may reflect the generally lower density of human groups occupying the site at one time. The position of the hearths near the cave wall and the extensive ash spread in the upper part of the cave may also have been partly connected with sleeping or resting activities. For example in ethnographic contexts, it has been noted that ashy spreads between the hearth and the rock wall may coincide with places where bedding was laid down (Parkington and Mills 1991) (Barton 2000:218-219).

    McBrearty and Brooks (2000:511-512) give a long list of MSA and associated sites with shellfish remains (taken broadly to include land snails and tortoises). This is a very long passage, and so I won't quote it, except for the conclusion:

    Evidence from coastal Italy (Stiner, 1993, 1994; Stiner et al. 1999) and Gibraltar (Barton et al., 1999) shows that Neanderthals did sometimes eat marine shellfish, but the impressive escargotière at Mumba [Rock Shelter, Tanzania] and the numbers of coastal African sites containing quantities of shellfish seem to indicate a more regular intensive use of small scale resources in the MSA (McBrearty and Brooks 2000:512).

    This is certainly one of those where I wouldn't want to have to be the graduate student to test that assertion -- after all, how many coastal Neandertal sites are there? And the occurrence of a unique site where land snails were intensively exploited doesn't seem like the best evidence. Notice how Barton described the relatively nonintensive occupation of the Gibraltar Mousterian caves. It would take some pretty sophisticated sampling to work out whether Neandertals and MSA Africans were significantly different in use of these resources.

    Common sense suggests they wouldn't be, at least not without some reason. After all, the other protein-rich foods they had available were vastly more dangerous and risky to acquire. Finding shellfish at coastal sites would seem more like filling an obvious archaeological blind spot than saying something distinctive about resource collection abilities.

    But then, the use of shellfish in particular figures into the "coastal dispersal" hypothesis for out-of-Africa. The idea that archaic humans were incapable of exploiting coastal resources is inconsistent with the data. But Paul Mellars (2006) presents a curious alternative view:

    The second major factor in stone tool technology lies in the specific functions for which the tools were required. If, as most of the current models suggest, the initial colonization of southeastern Asia and Australasia followed a primarily coastal route (12, 18, 20, 21, 61), then the technologies would be likely to adapt primarily to the exploitation of coastal resources, such as fish, shellfish, and marine mammals (together with tropical plant foods) with perhaps only a minor component of hunting larger land mammals, of the kind that clearly formed a major part of the human economy in both Africa and the whole of western Asia and Europe (21, 59). This would presumably have involved much less emphasis on various forms of hunting equipment (such as spears, meat-processing tools, etc.), as well as equipment involved in the manufacture of elaborate skin clothing, or the construction of tents and other living structures, that were essential to survival in much colder, more northerly environments (59, 62).

    In other words, Mellars proposes that southeast Asia and Australasia lost stone tool complexity that would have been present in their African ancestors, because they didn't eat many large land mammals.

    This takes shellfish-dependence full circle -- hunters that once took African big game found instead that they could live the easy life following the coast and eating marine resources. Well, maybe -- it still seems like a lot of arm-waving based on distributions that may not be different from each other in any real way.

    References:

    Barton N. 2000. Mousterian hearths and shellfish: late Neanderthal activities on Gibraltar. In Stringer CB, Barton RNE, Finlayson JC, eds., Neanderthals on the Edge: Papers from a conference marking the 150th anniversary of the Forbes' Quarry discovery, Gibraltar. Oxbow Books, Oxford. pp. 211-220.

    McBrearty S, Brooks AS. 2000. The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior. J Hum Evol 39:453-563.

    Mellars P. 2006. Going East: new genetic and archaeological perspectives on the modern human colonization of Eurasia. Science 313:796-800. DOI link

    Tags: 
    MSA
    Neandertals
    out-of-Africa
    shellfish
    diet
    foraging
    aquatic resources
    Synopsis: 
    I thumb through some references about Neandertal and MSA use of aquatic resources.
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