Читать книгу Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories - Simon Winchester - Страница 12

The Western Cape, the administrative name for the most southerly corner of South Africa, is where the waters of the Indian Ocean blend into the cold chill of the South Atlantic. It is a fearfully dangerous coastline, heaped with shipwrecks: oil tankers too big for Suez pass south of Cape Agulhas and then hug the coastline on their way to or from the wellheads, and seem to collide with each other with a dismaying frequency, resulting usually in the spillage of much unattractive cargo and the deaths of scores of African penguins.

I have sailed in these waters, and know them to be very trying. Almost all vessels like to keep close to shore to avoid the notoriously extreme waves of the deeper sea, and there are few harbours to which one can run in the event of bad weather. The combination of crowded sealanes (all littered with local fishing vessels, too), cold and rough waters, and a forbidding and havenless rockbound coastline is one that few mariners — and certainly few quasi-inept strangers, as I used to be - care to experience.

I still have my old South Africa Pilot, the blue-backed sailing directions I used on the yacht. The rather beautiful Vlees Bay it notes as a landmark lies between two rocky headlands - Vlees Point to the south and, nine miles to its north, Pinnacle Point. Back when the Pilot was written, its hydrographer-authors noted the presence near Pinnacle Point of “a group of white holiday bungalows,” noting them not for aesthetic reasons, but because they would have provided visible markers for ships making their way along the coast.

This gathering of second homes has transmogrified over the thirty years since the Pilot was written into an almighty village — the Pinnacle Point Beach and Golf Resort — devoted to costly seafront hedonism. The peddlers of the resort like to say that the sea air, the Mediterranean climate, the white water, and the peculiar local floral kingdom known as fynbos, which here renders their ironbound coastal landscape unusually attractive, all combine to transform the place into “a new Garden of Eden”.

Little do they know how apposite their slogan is. Pinnacle Point may be on the verge of enjoying fame among professional golfers and retired businessmen - but it has been known for very much longer to archaeologists consumed by the history of early man. For Pinnacle Point appears to be the place where the very first human beings ever settled down by the sea. Specifically there is a cave, known to the archaeological community as PP13B, situated a few-score feet above the wave line (though not quite out of earshot of the ninth tee), where evidence has been found showing that the humans who first sheltered there did such things as eat shellfish, hone blades, and daub themselves or their surroundings with scratchings of ochre. And they did so, moreover, 164,000 years ago, almost exactly.

An American researcher, Curtis Marean, from the School of Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, was among the first to realise the importance of the cave, in 1999. He had long suspected, from what he knew of Africa’s chilly and inhospitable climate during the last major glaciation, that such humans as existed would probably travel to cluster along the southern coast, where the ocean currents brought warmer water down from near Madagascar, and where food was available both on the land and in the sea. He decided that these humans probably sheltered in caves - and so he looked along the coastline for caves that were sufficiently close to the then sea level⁷ to allow the humans to get to the water, yet sufficiently elevated that their contents weren’t washed away by storms and high tides. Eventually he found PP13B and had a local ostrich farmer build him a complicated wooden staircase so his graduate students didn’t fall to their deaths clambering to the cave mouth - and began his meticulous research. Marean’s paper, published in Nature eight years later, drily recorded a quite remarkable find.

There was ash, showing the inhabitants lit fires to keep themselves warm. There were sixty-four small pieces of rock fashioned into blades. There were fifty-seven chunks of red ochre, of which twelve showed signs of having been used to paint red lines on something — whether walls, faces, or bodies. And there were the shells of fifteen kinds of marine invertebrates, all likely to have been found in tide pools - there were shore barnacles, brown mussels, whelks, chitons, limpets, a giant periwinkle, and single whale barnacle that the Arizonans believe came attached to a whale skin found washed up on the beach.

How the community decided to dine on shellfish remains open to conjecture. Most probably the inhabitants saw seabirds picking up the various shells, cracking them on the rock shelves, and gorging themselves on the flesh within. Disregarding the so far unattested assertion⁸ that it was a brave man who ate the first oyster, the cave dwellers swarmed down to the oceanside and promptly wolfed down as many molluscs as they could find - eventually repeating what must have been this very welcome gastronomic adventure on every subsequent occasion that the tides generously provided them with more.

The experience had a signal effect on this small colony, and on humankind in general - which makes it all the more remarkable that the financiers of the local golf course chose “Garden of Eden” as their slogan. The effect was of far greater significance than might be suggested by a mere change of diet, from buffaloes to barnacles, from lions to limpets. The limitless abundance of nourishing food meant the settlers could now do what it had never occurred to them to do before - they could settle down.

They could at last begin to consider the rules of settlement - which included the eventual introduction of both agriculture and animal husbandry and, in good time, civilisation.

Moreover, their ochre colourings suggest that for the first time these cave colonists began to employ symbols - signs perhaps of warning or greeting, information or suggestion, pleasure or pain, simple forms of communication that would have the most enduring of consequences. An early seaside human might go down to a certain crab-rich tide pool and merely expect or hope that others would follow him. But then he might decide to create a sign, to use his recently discovered colour-making stick to mark this same tide pool with an indelible ochre blaze — ensuring at a stroke that all his cave colleagues would now be able to identify the pool on any subsequent occasion, whether its initial finder went there or not. Thus was communication initiated — and from such symbolic message making would eventually emerge language - one of the many kinds of mental sophistication that distinguish modern man.