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Last updated: 08 May 2006

Seashore Foraging & Fishing Study

Early Human Diet

Indo-Pacific Shoreline Ecotone

The shoreline of the Indian Ocean and of Sundaland to the east, was crucial to the development of mankind. 

The Indian Ocean/Sundaland shoreline is the longest ecological fracture line in the world. 

I appreciate that this map is not all it could be - it will be improved in later editions of this web page.

It's an amalgam of at least 14 different maps stuck onto an amazing topographical  map from http://www.topex.ucsd.edu/.

Other sources have been

www.coral.noaa.gov/reef_maps, Early Acheulian evidence from South Asia & Marine Biology - Peter Castro, Michael Huber

Don't read too much into the map

The pink area shows the approximate extended maximum land area for much (about 80%) of the Pleistocene, when ice ages lowered the level of the sea, exposing the shallow continental shelf of huge areas.

A massive part of the evidence of human prehistory is lost for ever.

It shows only some of the places where Early Human bones or stone tools have been found, which may not show where the majority of those Early Humans actually were.

It shows the modern reef and mangrove distribution (or how it was about half a century ago). The only projection that can confidently be made back into the remote past is that similar distributions may have occurred in roughly the same places, if major river systems and ocean currents were much the same. 

Indo-Pacific Ecotone: Size

The total measured coastline length of the Indo-Pacific Ecotone is 245000 km  

That long, thin, but resource-full band has an area of, at minimum, 500,000 sq km, based on the narrow definition  of a shoreline extending from wherever at sea the low spring tide reaches to a 20 minute amble (about 2km) inland.

It borders the Indo-West Pacific (IWP), a marine ecological area that extends from Oceania to the Red Sea and East Africa, making it the largest marine biogeographic region on Earth. The IWP is characterized in part by the numerous species that range throughout its vast extent (Ekman, 1953). 

Add in the virtually identical distributions for shoreline mammals and reptiles and you'll have a picture of the huge, almost uniform ecological zone available to Early Humans. Compare that to the traditional idea of Early Humans chasing different savannah, desert, or grassland ungulates across wide, open, and very dry areas of a quarter of the globe, and judge for yourself which is the more likely.

Over 1 billion people (one sixth of the world's population) now live within 100km of this coastline.

The countries bordering the Indo-Pacific ecotone catch 32 million tons of fish per year and 6 million tons of shellfish, mostly with traditional coastal craft.

Kenya is 582646 sq km in absolute total, about 8% of which is uninhabitable lake, desert, or mountain. 

The Serengeti National Park, traditionally the 'Homeland of Humanity' has just 14,800 sq km.

The USA has only 133,312 miles of coastline, much of which is Alaska, and they catch just 5.4 million tons of fish and shellfish per year. 43% of Americans live within 100km of their coastline.

What is an Ecotone? 

A zone between ecosystems: a zone of transition between two different ecosystems, for example, where the sea meets the land

[Early 20th century. Coined from eco- + Greek tonos “tension.”]
Microsoft® Encarta® Reference Library 2004. © 1993-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Why the Indian Ocean shoreline ecotone?

It seems, from all the known evidence, genetic, palaeoanthropological, and archaeological, that the first wave of 'Out-of-Africa' Truly Modern Humans followed this route. I argue here that this attractive route sufficed before, over a couple of million years, for previous Early Human dispersals.

A followup series of studies of mitochondrial DNA of indigenous peoples of Malaysia and the Andaman islands by Thangaraj et al. (2005), Macauley et al. (2005), and Forster and Matsumura (2005) further suggests that our African ancestors took an initial southern route along the coastline of the Indian Ocean around 65 thousand years ago:

The route may indicate a seafood diet. According to Forster and Matsumura's assessment of the genetic evidence, the rest of Asia, Europe, and the Americas were colonized by descendants of this initial group of migrating early humans. From the mitochondrial data the authors estimate this founding population included only several hundred women. Europe and the Middle East, according to Macauley et al. (2005), was settled from an early offshot of this migration that moved into Europe once the climate improved.

Forster, Peter & Matsumura, Shuichi (2005). Did Early Humans Go North or South? Science, Vol 308, Issue 5724, 965-966 , 13 May 2005. Full text (external).

Early humans 'followed coast'. BBC News, 13 May 2005. Full text (external).
Macaulay, Vincent et al. (2005). Single, Rapid Coastal Settlement of Asia Revealed by Analysis of Complete Mitochondrial Genomes. Science, Vol 308, Issue 5724, 1034-1036 , 13 May 2005. Full text (external).

Thangaraj, Kumarasamy et al. (2005). Reconstructing the Origin of Andaman Islanders. Science, Vol 308, Issue 5724, 996 , 13 May 2005. Full text (external).

Cogweb Paleoanthropology

I have few arguments with the map conjectured above. 

- I don't think Truly Modern Humans started their journey just a few miles north of Lake Victoria. It's more 'parsimonious' to think they just ambled, from where they already were, slowly along the Kenyan coast, to north and south. They didn't go much further beyond the 'Skeleton Coast' of Namibia, to the south-west, but, in the other direction, they went all the way to Tierra del Fuego.

- They have, as everybody does, left out my home, the Philippines. This man, a descendant of one or two of the very first Truly Modern Humans to arrive here, might be disappointed to be left out, but, since he's now a refugee in his own homeland, perhaps he won't care too much.

Shoreline Definition

This is an entirely personally-defined boundary, but one that I, as a very lazy and not very energetic 'field scientist', feel comfortable that I can achieve with ease. 

The shoreline is a quick-change ecotone

Contrasted with the slow, gradual change from forest to grassland, for example, the grade between land and sea is often minimal, but there is one.

Which would be inherently more likely - wandering a beach like the one on the left, or crossing a desert as imagined above?

Shoreline Ecotone - Land Side

On land, the gradient includes the saltwater splash zone, the salty atmosphere belt, usually a humid and equable backup woodland or beach forest, and then the slow gradual steps up to a fully terrestrial landscape. 

There are extremes, of course, as in parts of the Red Sea, where sections of the Arabian and Egyptian Deserts continue down, relentlessly, almost to the sea's edge, and then magically transform into rich and amazingly fruitful underwater ecosystems.

But even that transition is exceptional; most desert/sea margins are very much more fertile than they are just a few miles inland.

Certainly, such horribly arid deserts might have been a very major barrier to Early Human migration along the Indo-Pacific shoreline.

But, during some 80% of the Pleistocene (from 2Mya to 10kya) northern regions were covered with ice sheets, and areas that are totally arid now enjoyed pluvial periods (rainy centuries).

In any case desert/sea shore margins are, even now, in one of the driest periods of all time, not as bad as you might think.

Mangroves

Mangrove distribution - Indian Ocean & West Pacific

The 'current distribution' of Indian Ocean and Western Pacific mangroves as shown in this map is 'what it should be'; it's not  the sorry, much depleted remnant that exists today. Had all the shores shown bordered  with green actually had their mangroves, the death toll in the December 2004 tsunami might have been far fewer.

The map shows concentrated areas of mangrove; there may scattered patches in other areas. Certain areas, like the Somali, Arabian, and Pakistani coasts, plus large stretches on both sides of India, lack both mangroves and coral reefs.

East African mangroves total about about 600,000-1,200,000 ha. India has 100,000-700,000 ha, and the Bay of Bengal, the Sunderbans, and the Ganges delta support over 500,000 ha of mangrove. Sri Lanka has about 10,000 - 12,000 ha. Since 1963 about 50 percent of India's mangroves have been destroyed. 

State of the Reefs - Indian Ocean

I've changed my views on mangroves since I first wrote

Mangroves  - Fit For Human Habitation?

(now revised) a year ago, after an uncomfortable first plod through a local mangrove swamp.

Mangrove forests may not be suitable for pleasant afternoon country walks, but many very sane people choose to live in the midst of them.

Where else could you find freeway for your boat (your major transport), free takeaway sewage services, fresh food for the taking, and no mosquitoes?

Where else could you keep a pig for fattening, and not have to clean its pen, because all the droppings go through the floor and feed the oysters?

These photos were taken in Pilar, a local village almost entirely built in a mangrove swamp. The bandung (dugout canoe) tipped over immediately after this photo, soaking everyone, but my camera suddenly stopped working. Still the girls just laughed. Who's to say you shouldn't be happy in a swamp?

Beach Forest

The high tide line also concentrates certain nutritious land plants (coconuts, bananas, tamarind, etc) whose floating seeds are washed up with every high tide, to germinate and drop their fruit on the beach. See: Coconut Origins Those seeds, together with many less edible ones, produce the basis of the beach forest, that once stretched  throughout the whole Indo-Pacific shoreline, for very roughly the same 2km inland that a lazy ambler can walk to in 20 minutes.

Forgive me, I'm no great botanist, so I can give, at this stage of my studies, only local names:

- Bito-on (Barringtonia), Paguha (Wild banana), Casuarina, Talisay, Dap-dap, Ipil-ipil, Nipa, Coconut (of course), and many others.

These naturally seeded trees produce a rich woodland, just backing the shore. It is, very roughly, the same kind of forest from Mozambique to Shanghai, and will be full of nutritionally productive plants.

It's not for nothing that, here in the Philippines, the vegetarian Island Fruit Bat and Colugo restrict their range to these forests.

See: Shoreline Mammals

Due to the concentration of humans (more than 40% of the world's population lives within 60 miles of the sea shore) most of the natural beach forests are long gone, and only very scattered relicts remain.

Northern Zanzibar-Inhambane coastal forest (mosaic)

This is a much deeper-ranging inland forest than the shore-fringing beach forest described above, but it illustrates the Indo-Pacific coastline forests, and what has happened to them.

This is the northernmost ecoregion of the eastern and southern African coastal forest belt, and is found in Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania. The northern margin is an isolated forest outlier along the Jubba Valley in central coastal Somalia (Madgwick 1988). The ecoregion then resumes in southern Somalia, extends into northern Kenya, inland along the Tana River, and then follows the narrow coastal strip in central and southern Kenya to the border with Tanzania. In northern Tanzania the ecoregion extends around the base of the East Usambara Mountains where the habitat intergrades with that of the Eastern Arc Mountains. It then continues along the coast of northern Tanzania to Dar es Salaam where outliers of the ecoregion extend inland at the base of the Uluguru, Nguru and Udzungwa Eastern Arc Mountains. It again narrows around the Rufiji River, continuing along the coast until it meets the border of the next ecoregion around the Tanzanian town of Lindi. The ecoregion includes the large offshore islands of Pemba, Zanzibar and Mafia and other smaller islets in the Indian Ocean close to the coast.

Terrestrial Ecoregions -- Northern Zanzibar-Inhambane coastal forest mosaic

Once, not so very long ago, this was a wide band of forest stretching along the East African coastline from Somalia to south Tanzania, for some way inland, and further along major river banks. It stretched all along the coast, behind the mangroves, and was a rich source of food and other resources for Early Human coastal dwellers.

It is now, very aptly, called a 'mosaic', because there is hardly any of it left.

Modern humans have destroyed it for agriculture (valuable stuff, like tree plantations and sisal) and firewood.

Of the 158 mammal species in this particular forest, nearly two-thirds are the 58 bats, 27+ rodents, and 14 shrews. The mammals comprise 17% of the total African repertoire. One third of the reptiles are strictly endemic.

Larger species include only: bushpig, bushbuck, yellow baboon, elephant, leopard, lion, and caracal, so they

would be of little interest to  those members of the Skull & Bones Club who think that Early Humans thrived on

big game, or to the White Hunters and colonial planters, who preferred up-country.

Consequently, the Northern Zanzibar-Inhambane coastal forest was never celebrated, or visited much, except by the most devoted of naturalists, and is now almost totally unknown.

This little band of forest, when it prospered, was, more than probably, the real home of humanity.

Not the Rift Valley, where ancient human fossils have been fortuitously exposed by tectonic and volcanic activity and fierce erosion, and exciting big game and predators (and, at one time, tsetse flies) are in profusion (and the climate and amenities are better for academics to dig in their summer vacations), but this modest, almost unknown band of forest, backing the rich profusion of food on the coast.

And it wouldn't have been continuous. On the very dry and arid shorelines backed by deserts, only the mouths of scattered seasonal wadis could have supported such a flora. But anyone who's seen the extraordinary botanic profusion of desert creek mouths, like Engeddi on the Dead Sea, where King David once killed a leopard, will know what I mean.

Almost all of that has gone, forever.

Shoreline Ecotone - Sea Side

In the sea, the zones are reversed - the highest levels are the ones affected most by light, heat and desiccation. You could map almost any shoreline, from spring high to spring low tides, by the animals, plants and algae that have adapted themselves to different degrees of exposure to a deadly element, the air. Then, further out, the sea ecology grades according to the amount of direct sunlight received.

Coral Reefs

Corals have adapted exquisitely to very exact levels of sunlight and heat (helped and supported by essential symbiotic algae and bacteria). 

Acropora corals have such a narrow range of tolerances that, if you find a fossil Acropora species above or below the current tidemark, you can estimate the sea-level at the time it lived to within a couple of feet. If you can date the coral carbonates as well, you can work out exactly when and how the sea levels rose and fell (or in awkward cases, when the land itself rose or fell).

As of now, there's a problem. The photosymbiotic zooxanthellae that sustain the coral coelenterates are so sensitive to light and temperature that they die if the conditions are ever so slightly wrong. Global anthropogenic (man-made) climate change is inducing 'coral bleaching' worldwide. That's a nice way of saying the corals are dying by the multitude. The coral reefs are going south, everywhere.

It's happened before - whole orders, families, genera and species of corals have died off, over the past 500My or so, together with their attendant fish, crustaceans, and molluscs. But don't worry; it takes only a couple of million years to establish a new bunch on the block.

So there was no continuous reef-foraging path from Mombasa to Modjokerto. Instead, there was a patchy, discontinuous fringing reef from the East African coast (with the longest coast-fringing coral reef in the world - Australia's Great Barrier Reef is very much offshore) past Somalia, with its barren shoreline, past Arabia, without much, but may well have had more reefs in pluvial periods, and past a big gap from Baluchistan to Burma to the riches of South East Asia.

But reef-building corals are very particular; they can only build their vast cities where conditions are exactly right. In other, less favoured places, mere patches and lumps can establish themselves, in much the same way that Manhattan grew in the right place, but Teaneck, NJ, didn't. But you can still buy the same hamburger in Teaneck as in Manhattan, and so could Early Humans find the seashore foods they had grown accustomed to, either by a small patch of coral, or by a huge reef.

Not an awful lot of useful food can be found on the live reef itself; it's too full of coral and small fish doing their stuff. But the sun-seared shallow dead patches, the caves and crevices underneath the corals, and the sandy debris between heads are rich in molluscs and fish, and off the fore reef are the best fish of all.

It is estimated that over 20 percent of the (Indian Ocean) coral reefs and five percent of the seagrass beds have been destroyed (IUCN/UNEP, 1985). Few scientific studies exist to document the extent of damage.  

Sedimentation from agricultural practices is a major problem throughout the region. The problem is critical in Comoros and has also affected reefs off the Seychelles, Dar es Salaam, and Zanzibar. Eutrophication is a problem in Port Louise, Dar es Salaam, and Zanzibar.

State of the Reefs - Indian Ocean

It's more than likely that somewhat more has been destroyed over the last 20 years since that report.

Eutrophication is a nice 'scientific' word to describe the effects of too much human shit.

In 'developed' countries, the same problem is caused by too much nitrogenous fertiliser running off the land. Third World farmers can't afford such excesses.  Nor can they afford privies and sewage plants. and there are an awful lot of them shitting in the sea.

There was a very rapid rise in sea level, faster than two meters per century, over two one-thousand year intervals approximately 12,500 to 7,000 years ago.  This exceeds the maximum rate of coral reef growth, and thus most Pleistocene reefs were drowned and killed off.  So it's happened before.

Bill Chaisson

Seagrass Beds

Seagrasses are just about the only flowering plants that live wholly in the sea. There are many species (Siargao Island alone has eight different species). Seagrass beds are about 5 times as productive, in terms of biomass, as terrestrial grasslands, and about the same as fertiliser-fed temperate farmlands.

They are the major dietary staples for marine turtles and dugongs, both of whom existed in vastly greater numbers in the past

See: Shoreline Mammals, Shoreline Reptiles.

Stephen Jay Gould, in 'Eight Little Piggies' tells the pathetic tale of Lottia alveus, a small West Atlantic seagrass limpet, the first species of marine invertebrate organism (known) to have become extinct in historical times. Between 1930 and 1933, the seagrass Zostera marina was attacked by Labyrinthula slime mould, and Zostera was virtually wiped out.

The seagrass managed to survive in less saline waters, where Lottia and Labyrinthula could not.

When Zostera re-established itself in its old haunts, Lottia was no longer around.

Seagrass beds are being rooted up in vast acreages. 

My odious German neighbour, see: Siargao Island Guide, has used a backhoe to 'clear' enough seagrass in

front of his 'resort' to enable his customers to use the ridiculous pedalos he has introduced.

Seagrass beds are found throughout the region and are under pressure from intensive use of bottom traps and beach seines, explosives fishing, sand mining and dredging. Extensive seagrass beds are found in southern India and in the many estuaries of Sri Lanka where they cover an area greater than that covered by mangroves and coral reefs, make the largest contribution to primary productivity in coastal waters, and support over 50 percent of the countries coastal fishery production. The degree of exposure and water turbidity limit the extent of seagrasses in western India and populations are negligible off Bangladesh because of seasonal fluctuations in salinity.

Estuaries

Estuaries are highly productive ecosystems, accounting for one-half of the living matter of the world's oceans.

Many of the world's largest cities - including New York City, London, Montreal, Hamburg, Bordeaux, Cairo, and Kolkata - were founded near estuaries. The most striking features of estuaries are their high productivity and abundance of both freshwater and marine animals. 

Although the largest single fisheries in the world are oceanic - for example, the Grand Banks off the island of Newfoundland - estuaries are more important to total world yields.   Microsoft Encarta

Between one-half and two-thirds of the fish and shellfish harvested annually in the United States may come from estuaries. Important estuarine fishery areas include Chesapeake Bay, Bay of Campeche, the Ganges-Brahmaputra, and the mouth of the Amazon River around the island of Marajó. Louisiana alone is reported to have some 14,000 shrimp boats that fish regularly on the Mississippi Delta and offshore. Microsoft Encarta

Today's estuaries began to take their current form during the last interglacial period (a warm period during which polar caps melt), when sea level rose about 120 m (about 394 ft). However, the relatively high sea levels and extensive estuaries found today have been characteristic of only about 10 to 20 percent of the last million years. When sea level was lower, during glaciation periods, estuaries were much smaller than they are at present and were located on what is now the continental slope. Unless sea level rises, estuaries tend to fill with sediments and become much smaller. 

Coastal-plain estuaries were formed during the last great rise in sea level, when melting glaciers in temperate latitudes flooded river valleys. In some tropical regions of low relief, such as the Amazon Basin, a combination of rising sea levels and increased rainfall led to greater flooding. Coastal-plain estuaries resemble a V-shaped river channel, usually less than 20 m (65 ft) deep, with an accompanying floodplain.

Microsoft Encarta

Map adapted from Microsoft Encarta and topographical map from www.topex.ucsd.edu

One of the clearest examples of this (if it's true) may be the Ganges river mouth, where the deep, narrow river valley of low sea-level periods contrasts strongly with the modern day diffuse river delta, and the half-drowned Sundarbans forest.

At the time when Homo erectus, or much, much later, Homo sapiens,  crossed the single mouth of the Ganges, he could have been crossing a quite narrow river valley.

On the other hand, that narrow steep valley could just have been cut by a sudden out-pouring of glacial waters as the Himalayan ice-cap melted and gushed out suddenly.

We'll never know, until someone goes down there and finds out - but I suspect that Bill Gates's expert is possibly wrong - the only Indian Ocean rivers that show this submarine estuary pattern drain from the Himalaya - there's similar deep submarine valley off the mouth of the Indus river.

If such a flash flood did happen, and gouged out a deep canyon, there must have been some defined channel already. There are some justifiable fears that very similar, and invisible, dammed-up under-ice Himalayan glacial melt lakes will burst out at any moment, due to 'global warming'.

When it happens, we'll all be surprised, not least the millions who live on the flood plains of the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra. Just as few of us ever saw or heard of a tsunami until Dec 26, 2005.

Salt Marshes

Salt-marsh estuaries are also part of the coastal plain. Although they have a well-defined drainage network, they are not usually fed by rivers and thus they contain predominantly salt water. This type of estuary is common from Cape Fear, North Carolina, to Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Microsoft Encarta

Salt marshes usually replace mangrove forests in more 'temperate' latitudes. They stretch across the Nile river mouth, and across the northern reaches of the Gulf, at the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates, and on the shallow China coasts.

Moses must have been very glad of them when a low tide enabled him to take his bunch of escaped slaves across the 'Red Sea' to the 'Promised Land', although, poor fellow, he never actually got there himself.

And they produce good food. Samphire was a valued vegetable in mediaeval Britain, and I still buy some when I go to Majorca every summer. It's a lot more delicious and healthy than broccoli.

Lagoons

Lagoons, in contrast to salt-marsh estuaries, have a less well defined drainage network and larger open areas and are usually shallow—often less than 2 m deep. A raised ridge, or sand barrier, is characteristic of lagoons. This feature was formed during the interglacial stage of the Pleistocene Epoch, some 80,000 years ago, when sea shorelines were about 6 m (20 ft) above present average levels. During the last ice age, fluvial and atmospheric processes eroded the earlier coast. When sea levels rose anew, the areas behind the barrier were once again flooded. Lagoons are present on all continents. Microsoft Encarta

Well that may be just a parochial American view, discussing lagoons without even mentioning one of the most important types in the world.  

This photo shows the small island of Guyam in the coral reef lagoon fronting my town of General Luna. The little white thing in front is a 30ft banca fishing boat.

You can clearly see the line of surf on Pisangan, the barrier reef, the back reef into the lagoon, the dead coral remnant that Guyam has formed on, the coconut trees and strand flora, the sand that collects and spreads with every storm, and the seagrass beds and coral knolls around the island.

Blue bits are © 1993-2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved to the richest man in the world.  Black bits are by me.

Your easy foraging and hunting grounds will be renewed - twice a day and monthly

Food resources at the shoreline are renewed twice a day by the tide, and monthly, by the moon's tidal cycle.

I've spent most of my life in cities, so I had no real feeling for the regularity and predictability of the tides until I came to Siargao Island. Now, even if I can't see the moon, I know that, when the kayabang crabs come walking, it's about full moon time.

This one turned up in my desk-side waste basket this evening. If it's not pissing down with rain, I'll be out watching  the full moonrise tomorrow, and perhaps walking out to the reef at low spring tide to catch my lunch.

The monthly cycle of the moon has  virtually nil effect inland, but the calendars of two major religions, Islam and Jewish, are based on it. Christian festival times, like Easter, vary with the Paschal Full Moon.

The correlation of human oestrus cycles with the tides and moon may only be a coincidence, but it may be significant. Watch this space.

Modern terrestrial marginal hunter-gatherers are no model for our past.

Imagine you're a classic hunter-gatherer, one of the very few who still survive in marginal areas - a San Bushman in the interior of the Kalahari, a Hadza male in Tanzania, an Australian aboriginal, or even an Andamanese islander. 

Andamanese bowmen

It's supposed to be an easy life - apart from entertaining visiting anthropologists, all you have to do is go out and hunt some game. You'll be out with your mates, having a bit of fun. And, if you don't get anything, then you'll be a jolly good sport about it, and yarn away every evening over the campfire, which is a lot more enjoyable.

But all things being equal, about once every 9 or 10 days, you, or one of your mates, will catch something, and you'll have, like schoolboys, a bit of a midnight feast .

Meanwhile, your wife and children will forage and scrabble for the family's real food - digging tubers or termites, collecting water, mongongo nuts, mopane worms, or whatever is around your particular territory, in this specific season, on this certain day. 

So, just a very few of you can survive in what may look like very unpromising territory. You will never be over-crowded; there's simply not enough food available. Your brats will die of hunger, disease or predation before you've sired enough to increase the general pool of humanity.

In marginal areas, your lifestyle doesn't lead to successful expansion of your race. Your wife and kids' scratching around for roots, seeds, nuts, insects, lizards and so on can only just about feed a family.

Whatever is available from hunting probably doesn't filter down to the members of your family who need it most - the pregnant  nursing mothers, and your accidental offspring.

You'll use it to boost your street cred among your mates while you chat over the campfire.

Kristen Hawkes & Rebecca Bliege Bird Evolutionary Anthropology © 2002 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

So, unless your male ancestors, over the first 90% of human prehistory, were a great deal more unselfish, responsible, generous, disregarding of their peer status, and a lot more self-stinting than you are, it is highly unlikely that Early Human males hunting big game contributed anything whatsoever to Human Progress.

Let's face it - Andy Capp, Dagwood, and Fred Flintstone are probably better models of daring, intrepid hunter-gatherers than you are.

There certainly were 'relatively recent' specialist hunters of big game, like the Neanderthals of cold Europe, perhaps, the mammoth-hunters  of the Russian Steppe, the Clovis people of North America, and the evidence they've left of themselves has certainly been noticeable and sometimes spectacular. But, like the cowboys of the Old West, much of their spurious glamour has been conjured up by old men sitting in arm chairs.

We're all here for a summer holiday....

Sir Cliff Richard

Solomon Islands spear fisherman

On the sea shore, though, food is abundant - and the ones who need it most (women and children) can obtain it for themselves.

See: Seashore Foraging

It's very different, as I hope I've shown in some of these pages. 

Seafood is surprisingly easy to catch. I've been so seduced by the ingenious deep-sea fishing methods used by professional fishermen in my town, General Luna, that, for a long time, I missed the very simple methods used in smaller villages. 

In Tangbo, the villagers just go out at night armed with a bolo (machete) or a strong wooden stick, and simply slash or club sleeping fish. Others use poisonous tubli vine roots in rock pools, to knock out fish hiding in crevices or under seaweed. 

Parrotfish sleep at night under a ledge, wrapped in a gauzy cocoon of their own spittle - you can simply grab them.

Sea mammals and reptiles tend to be somewhat larger than land ones, and a lot easier to catch. Dugongs are almost the world's rarest sea mammal now, but once they grazed tropical sea grasses from Africa to Australia, in huge numbers. Sea turtles, even today, breed by the thousand on many islands. Neither of these takes much chasing to catch, and neither fights back.

Baguan Island DENR/PAL

The tiny island of Baguan, part of the Turtle Islands sanctuary, 74km off the coast of Borneo, hatches 100,000 Green Turtles every year. It is part of the only remaining major turtle rookery in SE Asia.

Once, almost every sandy tropical beach around the world was a turtle hatchery.

See Shoreline Mammals and Shoreline Reptiles

With food so abundant, and so safe and easy to get, people had time to relax, think, and play. In my town, which is really a subsistence fishing village, the men go long distances now, at night, to catch fish that were once abundant in-shore. But they still have plenty of time to doze, drink, and play cards in the daytime.

Some of them even think.

The shoreline is also a lot safer than the 'savannah'

... for the very good reason that two ecological zones meet, with a defined line. If you're standing with your back to either one, you've reduced your risk of predator attacks from it by 50%.

Suppose, out on the plains, you're attacked by a lion. All you can really do is run, (and run, and run) until you hit a spot where you can hide or climb, and avoid being eaten.

Down beside the seaside, you have a better chance. If a lion attacks you, you can take shelter in the sea. If a shark attacks you, you go for the land. You might not always succeed, but either way, you've got a 100% better chance of survival.

To give some perspective to the perception that many people have, since seeing 'Jaws - 1, 2, 3 etc' that sharks are fearsome predators:

USA Shark Data Period

Lightning Strikes

Lightning Fatalities

Shark Attacks

Shark Fatalities

TOTALS

 1959-1994

Number per Year (average)

6,470*

1,618*

412

17

179.7*

44.9*

11.4

0.5

*Lightning data for coastal states only. In the entire United States during the period 1959-1994 there were 13,057 lightning strikes on humans resulting in 3,239 deaths (362.7 and 90.0 per year, respectively).

International Shark Attack File (ISAF)

If these statistics aren't convincing - then see the similar chart

Map of Asia's Confirmed Unprovoked Shark Attacks 

I was certainly surprised to see that, between 1580 and 2004, Iran reported the most, 23, with 8 fatalities, the last in 1985.

'Shark-infested seas' are a myth. They're as much part of the Second World War legend as John Wayne, Errol Flynn, and 'Kilroy Was Here".

Thanks to

Elson T. Elizaga

 who wrote to protest about Filipino newspapers using the words 'shark' and 'crocodile' to describe their politicians (who are not, of course, as nice as either crocodiles or sharks), and suggested the following website links:

Review of Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" -

But the sea "is dangerous" - here's a list of the dangerous creatures of East Africa, where early humans are conventionally supposed to have developed their humanity, compared with the ones you might encounter in the sea:

Dangerous Land Creatures

Sea Equivalent

Lion, Leopard, Buffalo, Elephant, Hippo, Rhino, Hunting Dog, Warthog, Baboon, Hyaena - not to mention extinct sabre-toothed cats, maxi-hyaenas, etc.

Sharks

28 species of sharks, worldwide, are known to have attacked divers. Of the 195 identified, 83 were White Sharks, 20 Tiger Sharks, 13 Sand Tigers, and the rest were in single figures. See above.

See: Shoreline Mammals for some 'very vicious' animals.

Nile Crocodile

'Saltwater' Crocodile See: Shoreline Reptiles

As a herd: Gnu, Wildebeest, Zebra, Buffalo

Barracuda, possibly, but they're more likely to run (sorry, swim).

Cobra, Mamba, Pit Viper

Sea snakes See: Shoreline Reptiles

Moray eels can be nasty, defending their territories, but you have to be nasty first, and poke it, to get bitten by one.

Porcupines

Poisonous-spined fish, like scorpion and lion fish, can inflict dangerous and even fatal poisoned wounds, but even they are difficult - you have to step on one heavily, or embrace it aggressively, before you come to any harm.

Acacia thorns, etc

Sea urchin spines can be very painful indeed, but most are not poisonous, and are eventually absorbed.  To cure the pain, you need only piss on the afflicted part.

Wasps & Bees

Jellyfish - there are some very nasty ones - 'bluebottles' for instance, or 'Portuguese Men o' War' who will treat you just like any other adventurous fish, and leave a trail of poisonous and very painful 'bites' across you. Use vinegar to relieve the pain. 

The sea has, in recent times, been thought to be 'dangerous' because so very few people in developed countries know it very well. 

I'm very much a born coward, but I go out, alone, snorkelling at night, without a qualm. In the scrub, or the forest, but especially in grassland, I anticipate every step for snakes, scorpions and other nasties.

Early Humans' Long Journeys

Mankind is generally considered to have begun in Africa, and in many successive waves, spread East, from about 1.8 Mya with Homo erectus, to a mere 70,000ya when a few hundred of our own Truly Modern Human ancestors set out on the same path. 

We took the coastal route because it was the easiest, and had far more available food than the dangerous hinterlands, although many of our ancestors travelled up large rivers, where some of their bones, and stone tools, have been found, all within river or lake contexts. 

See: African Lakes & Rivers

Early Humans seem to have got 'Out of Africa' very early