Humans were eating shellfish from a South African cave 165,000 years ago
Long before farming, people at Pinnacle Point on South Africa's coast were gathering marine food some 165,000 years ago, and Neanderthals on Mediterranean shores seem to have done the same. Seafood fed early settlements, shaped Greek price lists and even inspired a grisly Roman fashion for watching fish change colour.
Seafood covers far more than fish. Shellfish alone span molluscs such as oysters, mussels, squid and octopus, crustaceans such as crabs and lobsters, and echinoderms including sea urchins and sea cucumbers. Seaweeds and microalgae are eaten widely as sea vegetables, especially in Asia, and whales, dolphins and seals were once common fare, though much less so now. Much of the catch never reaches a human plate directly: a large share becomes feed for farmed fish or livestock, and kelp can serve as fertiliser.
Archaeology shows how old the habit is. Chemical analysis of the bones of Tianyuan man, who lived in eastern Asia about 40,000 years ago, reveals a regular diet of freshwater fish. Shell middens, fish bones and cave paintings point to the same dependence, and early settlements such as Lepenski Vir were almost always linked with fishing.
Along the Nile, fresh and dried fish were staples, and Egyptian tomb scenes and papyri record fishing gear and methods, sometimes hinting at fishing for pleasure. Greeks gave fishing low status and rarely painted it, yet Oppian of Corycus wrote a treatise on sea fishing between 177 and 180, the oldest such work that survives. Athenians ate sardines and anchovies, usually salted. A stone price list from Akraiphia in Boeotia, from the late third century BCE, shows bluefin tuna costing three times as much as the cheapest fish, probably parrotfish, while Lake Copais was famous across Greece for its eels.
Romans once prized the goatfish above almost anything, because its scales flush bright red as it dies out of water. Diners sometimes let the fish expire at the table, even in sauce. The fashion ended abruptly early in the Imperial era, so that in the Satyricon the upstart Trimalchio shows off a dying mullet and merely looks vulgar.
Source: Seafood
