The Ocean of Life

by Callum Roberts

  Pinnacle Point Cave 13B—the name sounds like a condo address—is on the coast of South Africa that was occupied on and off for thirty thousand years. It has enormous significance, for this cave was home to some of the earliest modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens.5 Today it lies beneath the ninth hole of the luxury Pinnacle Point Golf Resort, and more modern condominiums line the cliffs. Deep inside the cave, thick deposits mark the passage of time and tell the story of our awakening humanity. At the very beginning, 164,000 years ago, fragments of bright red ochre signal the first use of pigment, probably for adornment. Scratch marks crisscrossed over one piece suggest the emergence of symbolic art and small, sharp stone tools. At Blombos Cave, farther west on the coast, archaeologists found jewelry made seventy-five thousand years ago from tiny seashells perforated by predatory snails.

  The first occupants at Pinnacle Point gathered shellfish to eat at low tide, and much of the cave-floor deposits are drifts of shells. Shellfish was also consumed 140,000 years ago at Blombos and remained important for the entire time Blombos was used as a home.6 (Having once spent a summer in the company of a student whose research involved rotting heaps of shells, I can assure you that the smell would have tested the sternest of modern constitutions.) Bones of black musselcracker and mullet, fish that follow the rising tides to catch their prey, appear 77,000 years ago in Blombos. Since no hooks have been found with these fish bones, people probably speared them or caught them by hand. Or they may have been lured into shallow water by a chum made of broken urchins or shells and then speared with bone-tipped spears. A slightly later intellectual leap made at Pinnacle Point at least 71,000 years ago was the discovery that treating rock with heat made it easier to shape into tools such as spear points.7

  People have hunted food in large packages since our African ancestors first appeared long ago. The earliest evidence of consumption of aquatic foods comes from northern Kenya, where the remains of butchered fish, crocodiles, and turtles have been found alongside stone tools made by the predecessors of Homo erectus.8 In South Africa’s Blombos and Klasies River caves, alongside fish and shellfish, remains of penguins and seals complement catches of eland, antelope, and buffalo.

  Caves in Gibraltar occupied by Neanderthals over thirty thousand years ago likewise contain the bones of monk seals and bottlenose dolphins.9 The dolphins were probably scavenged carcasses of stranded animals, but the seals would have been hunted throughout the Mediterranean, relatively easy prey on their breeding beaches. Paleolithic paintings on the walls of Cosquer Cave, near Marseille on the south coast of France, show monk seals hunted with spears.10 Today the entrance lies 120 feet below sea level, a testament to the rising sea after the last ice age, but the cave slopes upward to a large chamber that remains dry. It was discovered by a French diver, Henri Cosquer, in 1985, but the paintings were not found until 1991, when he and two colleagues penetrated far into the cave and spotted images of human hands stenciled on the rock face. Subsequent expeditions revealed 177 paintings of bison, aurochs, and giant elk, many of them exquisite artworks. Cosquer Cave is almost unique in its representation of marine species. There are images of the now extinct great auk, as well as of monk seals, and of what seem to be jellyfish. The paintings date from around nineteen thousand years ago and were created by the ancestors of modern Europeans.

  Jon Erlandson, an archaeologist from the University of Oregon, believes that seafood use and other adaptations to life on the coast were pivotal to human migration out of Africa, as our ancestors followed the coast to Asia and later jumped over the Bering Strait to the Americas.11 The richly productive coastal habitats found along the way, such as coral reefs, mangroves, and kelp forests, would have provided abundant year-round food. From Asia, people dispersed through Indonesia, where land bridges joined many places that today are islands. The world was ice-bound at the time of this great migration, and sea levels fluctuated one hundred to two hundred feet below those of today. People did face water barriers, the most daunting of which must have been the gap between Indonesia and Australia. Remarkably, they made the leap to Australia at least fifty thousand years ago. A separate hop was made to the Ryukyu Islands south of Japan some thirty-two thousand years ago. Colonization of the Bismarck Archipelago and Solomon Islands had occurred between thirty-five thousand and twenty-eight thousand years ago, requiring additional voyages of over fifty miles, some of them out of sight of land.

  The peopling of Australia provides the first concrete evidence of boat use by modern humans.12 No physical remains of boats survive from this time, nor is there much direct evidence of fishing gear. Things made from wood or plant fibers withered away long ago. Even more durable materials, such as shell, from which fish hooks were often made, can only survive under some conditions. In most cases they have simply dissolved or crumbled to dust.

  The Earth was gripped by ice for much of the last 125,000 years. Frozen sheets heaped up on continents drew sea levels down by 390 feet. When the world began to warm again, around 20,000 years ago, it triggered a rise in the seas that continued until present sea levels were reached about 6,000 years ago. Much of the physical evidence of our coastal lives between 15,000 and 120,000 years ago simply washed away or was submerged.

  How did we catch fish at the very beginning? Early efforts to attract fish into the shallows with bait could have developed into active construction of tidal traps from stones. Remnants of similar traps are well-known from the Cape coast of South Africa, often built to block off natural gullies, though remnants of these traps date back no more than a century or so.13 Tidal traps made of brushwood and stakes are widely known from the last few thousand years, but time has erased all traces of the earliest ones.

  Some remarkable early evidence of our fishing prowess comes from East Timor, an island just north of Australia.14 Uplifted coral terraces at the east end of the island are riddled with caves and fissures and were occupied for thousands of years. Fish bone remains in the Jerimalai Rock Shelter date back forty-two thousand years and include inshore fish familiar from coral reefs, like parrotfish, groupers, and surgeonfish. But they also include fish that might have been caught offshore from boats, like tuna and shark. Although these animals could also have been caught from the shore, this interpretation fits with the idea that the ancestors of these people crossed the sea to Australia at least eight thousand years previously.

  Some of the most detailed evidence for the development of fishing has come from caves and shell middens in California’s Channel Islands. Their secrets have gradually been uncovered over the last two decades, in excavations by Jon Erlandson and his colleagues.15 Drifts of abalone, oysters, and clams, half buried in blown sand, afford mute testimony to the Native American predilection for seafood. These mounds go back twelve thousand years. So important was seafood in their diet that Erlandson and his colleagues suggest that a ring of kelp forests stretching from Japan to Mexico provided a “kelp highway” that helped seafarers from the Old World colonize the New thousands of years ago. California middens and cave shelters have yielded stone tools, fish gorges, hooks, harpoon points, and woven sea-grass artifacts. Fishers also had nets and traps by the time of their first contact with Europeans.

  Fish gorges provide the earliest trace of line fishing. A gorge is a stick, bone, or piece of shell that is sharpened at both ends, baited, and tied to a line in the middle. When the fish takes the bait the line is pulled and the gorge lodges at a right angle in its mouth or gut. Gorges are known from thirty thousand years ago in Europe,16 and may have been invented even earlier. Remarkably, they were still used by fishers on the Pacific Island of Palau, and probably by many others, well into the twentieth century. Fishers there said that, even though they were less effective than a hook, gorges were used because they were so easy to make.17 Early fishing lines were probably woven from animal hair or plant fibers. Palauan fishers made a strong twine from braided coconut fibers until the twentieth century, a method that had most probably been used for thousands of years.
<
br />   We have no idea when nets were first invented. Fragments have been found on the Black Sea coast and in caves in South Africa dating back thousands of years. They are depicted in 5,000-year-old Sumerian wall reliefs and 4,500-year-old Egyptian wall paintings, but they had doubtless been used for much longer. Archaeologists believe the 42,000-year-old tuna catches in East Timor were made with nets. Nets were probably made of flax, hemp, or spun grass. The first evidence of domesticated flax comes from caves in the Czech Republic and dates to 30,000 years ago.18 The first evidence of weaving, rather prosaically, comes from human bottom prints and bag impressions made on wet clay between 25,000 and 23,000 years ago, also in the Czech Republic.19

  Most fishing methods were probably invented many times over. Single-piece fish hooks that pop up in archaeological finds all over the world were used several thousand years ago. The earliest found to date was a shell hook from Jerimalai Cave in East Timor that could have been made 23,000 years ago. They appeared 3,000 years ago in California20 and in Australia about 1,200 years ago.21

  Against the vast panorama of human history, commercial fishing is a relatively recent development. Its first stirrings can be found in the Mediterranean and Black seas, but for over a hundred thousand years, people fished to meet their own needs or those of their close kin. Early man developed and honed his fishing skills in the rivers and lakes of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Wall paintings and reliefs show nets, traps, hook and line, and even the first representation of a fishing rod.22 Fishing appears to have developed as a specialist occupation here several thousand years ago.

  Evidence for commercial fishing gets stronger around 1000 BCE. The city of Gades, or Gadir, today known as Cadiz, was probably the foremost fishing port of the ancient world. It lies on the Andalusian coast of Spain, just west of the Strait of Gibraltar. The town owed its early fishing expertise to the Phoenicians, highly skilled seafarers from the Levant who reputedly founded the city around the tenth or eleventh century BCE. Gadir was one of the first Phoenician colonies, and it became an important source of grain, silver, tin, textiles, dyes, and salt fish. Over the next several centuries, Phoenician influence spread widely on trade routes that crisscrossed the Mediterranean. By 800 BCE dozens of Phoenician colonies punctuated these routes at places like Carthage in Africa and Genoa, Marseille, and Palermo along the modern-day coasts of Italy and France.

  Gadir was ideally placed for fishing. A great variety of fish thronged local waters, and the town was close to the seasonal migration route of the bluefin tuna, a six-foot giant well-known to the ancients that pops up repeatedly in literature. One author much taken by fish was Oppian, a poet from Corycus, a town in today’s southeastern Turkey. His father apparently displeased a visiting Roman dignitary and was banished to Malta in the second century CE. There as a young man Oppian wrote a thirty-five-hundred-line poem in Greek hexameters, Halieuticks of the Nature of Fishes and Fishing of the Ancients. The poem was so admired by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius that he paid him a gold piece for every line and pardoned his father. Here is Oppian’s description of the migration of bluefin tuna into the Mediterranean:

  The breed of Tunnies comes from the spacious Ocean, and they travel into the regions of our sea when they lust after the frenzy of mating in the spring. First the Iberians who plume themselves upon their might capture them within the Iberian brine; next by the mouth of the Rhone the Celts and the ancient inhabitants of Phocaea hunt them; and thirdly those who are dwellers in the Trinacrian isle and by the waves of the Tyrrhenian sea. Thence in the unmeasured deeps they scatter this way or that and travel over all the sea. Abundant and wondrous is the spoil for fishermen when the host of Tunnies set forth in spring. First of all the fishers mark a place in the sea which is neither too straitened under beetling banks nor too open to the winds, but has due measure of open sky and shady coverts. There first a skillful Tunny-watcher ascends a steep high hill, who remarks the various shoals, their kind and size, and informs his comrades. Then straightway all the nets are set forth in the waves like a city, and the net has its gate-warders and gates withal and inner courts. And swiftly the Tunnies speed on in line, like ranks of men marching tribe by tribe—these younger, those older, those in the mid season of their age. Without end they pour within the nets, so long as they desire and as the net can receive the throng of them; and rich and secret is the spoil.23

  Malta was then and remains to this day a major hub for tuna fishing. The accuracy of Oppian’s description of the bluefin tuna’s migration, breeding, and capture reveals just how well the ancients understood this fish. It also shows the great antiquity of the almadraba method of catching tuna, still in use today: an elaborate, chambered, net trap to intercept their coastal migration. Oppian died of plague at thirty, but his fame lives on for the remarkable insights he gave us into Mediterranean fisheries two thousand years ago.24

  It wasn’t long before eastern Mediterranean cultures developed methods to preserve fish with salt. By at least the fifth century BCE, salt fish was traded across the Mediterranean and Black seas. The importance of bluefin tuna in this trade is attested by the number of coastal cities that depicted the fish on their money. Coins from Gadir show two tuna, while those from Abdera in Spain show tuna as the pillars of a temple.25 Tuna was cut into pieces, cured with salt, packed into amphorae, and shipped to consumers hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles away. “Canned” tuna has been around a very long time! Several other fish were preserved and shipped this way, including sea bream and mullet, and huge catfish and sturgeon from rivers and estuaries.

  Oppian writes that the different kinds of nets are “innumerable” and lists eight main varieties: hand casting, draw, drag, round bag, seine (he used the word “sagene”), cover, ground, ball, and (my favorite) hollow all-catching. The art of fishing was clearly well advanced. Oppian tells of a clever device used when the fish lie close to the sea bed:

  They have a stout log, not long but as thick as may be, about a cubit in length. On the end of it are put abundant lead and many three-pronged spears set close together; and about it runs a well-twisted cable exceeding long. Sailing up in a boat to where the gulf is deepest, mightily they launch into the murky deep the pine-log’s stubborn strength. Straightway with swift rush, weighed down by lead and iron, it speeds to the nether foundations of the sea, where it strikes upon the weak Pelamyds [bonito tuna] huddling in the mud and kills and transfixes as many as it reaches of the hapless crowd. And the fishermen swiftly draw them up, impaled upon the bronze and struggling pitifully under the iron torture. Beholding them even a stone-hearted man would pity them for their unhappy capture and death.26

  It is hard to imagine today that a plank loaded with spikes thrown off the bow of a boat would catch anything at all. It could only work in an ocean crowded with fish or in water shallow and clear enough to see the target.27

  Polychrome mosaics were invented around the first and second centuries CE, and marine scenes soon became popular. There is a magnificent floor mosaic of sea fishing from the Catacomb of Hermes at Hadrumetum in Tunisia (another former Phoenician colony). Fishermen in boats ply their trade amid a sea crowded with a wondrous diversity of fish and lobster. Some use basket traps, others hook and line, another a harpoon; one casts a net and two men work a drift seine net buoyed by bobbing corks. The boats are small and powered by oars.

  The Mediterranean had long been plied by large, seaworthy craft, but there was little point in fishing from a big boat. Only the very wealthy could afford ice (the Roman writer Galen mentions preserving fish in snow in the second century CE28), so fishermen had to work close to the coast to prevent their catches from going off on long journeys back to port.

  Large-scale salting works were built around the shores of the Mediterranean in the fifth century BCE, especially in productive western waters. They made salt fish, but increasingly turned to the manufacture of fish sauces beloved by Greeks and Romans. Production varied over time but seems to have peaked between the fifth and fourth centuries
BCE, serving mainly Greek markets, and again in the first to the second century CE, when most of the region was under Roman rule.29 Some salting works contain enough vats to hold nearly forty thousand cubic feet of fish and sauce.

  Like Marmite or blue cheese today, fish sauces weren’t to everyone’s taste. In the first century CE Pliny the Elder called fish sauce an “exquisite liquid,” and the best grades of garum sold for a price equal to perfume,30 while Seneca railed, “It’s the overpriced guts of rotten fish!” at about the same time, and he wasn’t far from the truth. Most fish-salting works were smelly, and therefore located outside city walls, well away from residential areas.

  Recipes for fish sauce can be found in a tenth-century CE collection of the works of ancient writers.31 One directs you to take the intestines, blood, and gills of a bluefin tuna, add salt, and ferment the ensuing goo in a vase for two months. Another gives the method for a lower-grade sauce made from a mixture of many kinds of fish, usually those good for little else. (Anchovies were a favorite.) To one measure of fish add two of salt and let stand overnight, instructs another recipe. Then place the contents in a clay vessel and leave uncovered and exposed to the sun for two or three months, occasionally stirring with a stick. It sounds unappetizing (all the more so when you consider that allex, another kind of fish sauce, was made of the residue scraped from the bottom of the empty fermentation vessel).