Initial Investigations into the Exploitation of Coastal Resources in North Africa During the Late Pleistocene at Grotte Des Contrebandiers, Morocco

Abstract

While there has long been an interest in Holocene coastal adaptations globally (see other papers in this volume and Erlandson 2001), only more recently has attention focused on marine resource exploitation during the more ancient times of the Middle Paleolithic (MP) and Middle Stone Age (MSA) of Europe and Africa (∼250,000–50,000 years ago). The ancestors of all living humans originated in Africa sometime at the beginning, during, or at the end of the MSA, and therefore, investigations into the full variation of human adaptations during this time provide critical data on how changing diets and environments are linked to modern human origins. McBrearty and Brooks (2000) include “shellfishing” starting at 140,000 years ago (140 kya) and “fishing” at 110 kya in their list of behavioral innovations of the MSA (their Fig. 13:530) and as part of a general increase in diet breadth (their Table 3:492) that is indicative of fully modern human behavior. The earliest evidence of shellfishing has since been revised to at least 164 kya (Marean et al. 2007). In addition, Parkington (2003; see also Crawford et al. 1999) has proposed that the nutrients provided by shellfish were integral to building effective modern human brains during the MSA and, therefore, to modern human origins. Others see the exploitation of marine resources as typical of coastal living, and that real indicators of changing behavior, evidenced by further increased diet breadth and increased human population densities, come only after the end of the MSA (Klein et al. 2004). Because studies into coastal adaptations allow us to investigate the relationship between subsistence, technology, human population size and density, and the environment, these studies are uniquely positioned to inform on modern human origins, and therefore, it is important that future studies focus on marine resource exploitation during these ancient times.