Читать книгу Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories - Simon Winchester - Страница 11

Early man’s march down to the ocean began in remarkably short order. Just what impelled him to move so far and so fast - curiosity, perhaps; or hunger; or a need for space and living room - remains an enigma. But the fact remains that a mere thirty thousand years after the fossil record shows him to have been foraging the grasslands of Ethiopia and Kenya — hunting for elephants and hippos, gazelles and hyenas, building shelters and capturing and controlling lightning-strike fires - he began to trek southward through Africa, a lumbering progress toward the continent’s edge, toward the southern coastlines and a set of topographical phenomena of the existence of which he had no inkling.

The weather was becoming cooler as he went: the world was entering a major period of glaciation, and even Africa, astride the equator, was briefly (and before it became very cold indeed) more climatically equable, more covered with grassland, less wild with jungle. So trekking down south along the Rift was perhaps the least complicated of early man’s explorations - the mountain ranges on each side offering him a kind of protection, the rolling grassy countryside more benign than the jungles of before, the rivers less ferocious and more crossable. And so in due course, and after long centuries of a steady southern migration, man did reach the terminal cliffs, and he did find the sea.

He would have been astonished to reach what no doubt seemed to be the edge of his known world, at the sudden sight of a yawning gap between what he knew and what he knew nothing about. At the same time, and from the safety of his high and grass-capped cliff top, he saw far down below him a boiling and seemingly endless expanse of water, thrashing and thundering and roaring an endless assault against the rocks that marked the margin of his habitat. Quite probably he was profoundly shaken, terrified by the sight of something so huge and utterly unlike anything he had known before.

Yet he didn’t run yelping back to the safety of the savannah. All of the recently discovered evidence suggests he and his kin stopped where they were and made shelter on the shore. He chose first to do so in a large cave that was protected from the waves below by its location well above the high-tide levels. Then - whether timidly, or boldly, or apprehensively we will never know — he eventually clambered down and made it onto the beach proper. Then, while keeping himself well away from the thunder of the breakers, he knelt first to investigate, just as a child might do today, the magical mysteries of the seashore tide pools.

With the cliffs of land on one side and the brute majesty of the water crashing on the other, he was briefly captivated by the entirely new world of the pools. He gazed into their depths, which were crystal clear, yet fronded with green and furtive with darting movement. He dipped his finger into the water, withdrew it, tasted — it was very different from all he had known before, not sour and brackish like the poorer of the desert wells, but not fresh and sweet, probably not good for him to drink.

But nonetheless, it supported some kinds of life. The pool, as he looked at it more closely, was furiously alive with creatures -crabs, small fish, beasts with shells, weeds, anemones. And so by the same process of trial and error that had dominated his feeding and foraging habits on land in the millennia before, he eventually discovered in the pools an abundance of food for himself and his family. It was, moreover, good and nutritious food, and it was of a kind that he could hunt without running, that he could eat without cooking, that he could gather without putting his life at risk. Moreover, and mysteriously, it was a food that was somehow magically replenished with every one of the twice-daily refillings of the small watery world that lay before him.

Inevitably, man’s fascination with this strange new aqueous universe brought him to settle by the sea. He had come at last to Pinnacle Point.