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The shellfish eaters of Pinnacle Point

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c. 164,000 BC · Pinnacle Point, Mossel Bay, South Africa · Africa · Science

The first people known to live off the sea

The shellfish eaters of Pinnacle Point
Wikimedia Commons

Shells from Cave 13B on Africa's southern coast show people eating shellfish about 164,000 years ago, the earliest known systematic harvesting of seafood. A neighbouring cave holds the oldest evidence of people deliberately heating stone in a fire so that it would flake into sharper tools.