Re: opening oysters with stone tools?

richardparker01_at_yahoo.com
Date: 03/04/05 

Date: 3 Mar 2005 20:36:58 -0800

I think we've all been barking up the wrong tree, and asking the wrong
question about the wrong thing.

Perhaps the oystercatcher notion wasn't such a bad one

Most answers concerned opening oysters on dry land, not in the sea,
like oystercatchers and early fisher/foragers

Most posts tried to work out how they used stone tools, when they
didn't need to for this purpose, perhaps one of their main food
sources.

1- Underwater (I am not suggesting that early humans ate while
submerged, although they may well have done so)

- Underwater, bivalves (clams, mussels, oysters, etc) gape open, to
feed and respire. Like the oystercatcher, all you have to do is to nip
something in, cut the adductor muscle somehow, and the feast is yours.

- It's much more difficult when the animal is out of water. If it is
subject to daily tides (on top of a reef, say) it will have spent it's
whole life training to deal with exposure to a hot, desiccating sun for
about 4-8 hours daily. It's not going to allow you to get it open
easily, and leaving it out in the sun to open will take no effect for
at least 12, if not 24 hours. Though you might fool it if you left it
in a shallow pool and let the sun slow-cook it. For exactly the same
reason, most univalve (snail) species of shallow water and reef top
have a very thick operculum or sealable front door.

We've also been thinking about how clever professional oyster servers
are when they serve the oyster on the shell, whole, and both undamaged.

It's not at all necessary for a hungry shore forager to preserve the
shell - much easier to smash it and rinse off the bits in the sea - the
broken shell will wash away, but the flesh will still hold together.

This is exactly what you do when you cut open a sea urchin - there is
no way of doing a neat cut without involving spines, etc, so you rinse
off all those, and the unwanted intestines, etc, in the sea, and leave
a clean shell with just the bits you want to eat.

2 - As far as tools for the job are concerned - what is available
easily is best, of course.

Flint and chert are not readily available in the Far East (which is why
Hallam Movius named his line, East of which stone tools never seemed to
be found) - only one classic chert handaxe has been found in the
Philippines, for instance - the material simply isn't there.

Flint and chert are only fossilised remains of silicaceous sponge
spicules - they have all the properties of glass, another kind of
silica, and all of its problems - they can take a sharp edge, but they
have very low tensile strength - no good for levering things - which is
why you can knap it with an antler.

Shell, though, is another story. It's often, like an oyster shell, or
more spectacularly an abalone, a layered composite made of differing
crystal structures of calcium carbonate, and often chitin, giving it
all the advantages of flint (except the very razor sharp edge) and high
tensile strength.

So why bother with lugging round an Olduwan stone chunk, or an
Acheulian handaxe when your tools are readily available right where you
are ?

- A pearl oyster is thin, shaped perfectly as a hand scoop, and ideal
for levering open other bivalves. So is an abalone or a clam.
- Tridacna and other shells have been found as material for tools in
the Philippines.

(Marc - of anybody in this group - should have noted that when you eat
mussels in a Belgian restaurant, you use the shells of the first pair
as tongs to open and pick out the remaining shells, leaving your left
hand free to eat the Pommes Frites)

Oysters, anyway, are not the best of seafoods - until the end of the
19th century they were very much regarded as poor man's food, and they
are not highly regarded in the tropics because they are so fiddly and
yield so little.

A tridacna shell is much more attractive - it gapes open constantly in
quite shallow water, is huge compared to an oyster, very easy to jam
open with a handy rock, and almost certainly tastes better when you cut
the muscle and scoop it out. The addcutor muscle is best, like the
white piece of flesh in the middle of a scallop - it has the texture of
melon, and a great sea taste. They are much rarer now than they once
were, being big, but if you snorkel on the coast of Jordan or Saudi
Arabia, where people don't eat shellfish for religious reasons (just as
they don't on the other side of the Aqaba Gulf) - you will see plenty

Atlantic oysters are definitely the best, Pacific oysters next, but all
the others in the oyster family, and especially those who grow in
mangroves, provide very skimpy rations indeed.

The same seashell families, with identical shells or very close
cousins, are found from Mombasa to Modjokerto. So are the same
seaweeds, sea cucumbers, sea slugs, crustaceans and fish, coconuts and
bananas.

H erectus would have found the same familiar foodstuffs in the narrow
littoral band of banana and coconut infested foreshore, and the
seashore and reef all the way.

But he would have found very different animal and plant species from
place to place if he'd travelled overland. And very different, unknown
predators.

Which way do you think he chose? The known and safe, or did he venture
out into the great unknown?

Regards

Richard