ABSTRACT
The sea has ever provided a source of food for man. From mesolithic days, and doubtless for thousands of years before, shellfish were a staff of life to coast-dwellers before the invention of agriculture, to the hunters and gatherers who lived upon what they could find. The shell-heaps or kitchen middens on the coast of Denmark, some nearly a quarter of a mile long, fifty feet wide, and ten to twenty feet high, dating from the early Neolithic, are probably the accumulation from centuries of shell-fish gathering. Similar mounds are found on the coasts of North and South America and of east Asia – indeed, the natives of Tierra del Fuego, whose culture was still that of the stone age until the arrival of Europeans, were adding to their shell middens almost into the present century. These Indians, protected from a harsh climate only by cloaks of animal skins and flimsy sleeping shelters at night, were hunter-gatherers in whose diet raw shellfish gathered from the beach were an important part.
