An overview of stranded cetacean scavenging in Atlantic southern Africa since the Earlier Stone Age

Abstract

Along the southern African coastal plain, human occupation is documented since the end of the Early Pleistocene. The archaeological, palaeoenvironemental and ethnographic records suggest that in these arid to semi-arid landscapes where inland resources are sometimes scarce, coastal zones were attractive to past human populations. Among the intertidal resources, stranded marine mammals are known to have been sporadically available from several million years ago and have been scavenged by human groups since at least the Middle Pleistocene. This appears to be a regional behaviour rooted deep in time. In this paper, we review the ethnographic and archaeological data related to stranded marine mammal scavenging from the Earlier Stone Age up to recent times and we discuss the specificities of this subsistence behavior in Atlantic southern Africa.