Re: opening oysters with stone tools?

From: Marc Verhaegen (fa204466_at_skynet.be)
Date: 03/04/05 

Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2005 19:49:47 +0100

<richardparker01@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1109911018.536578.253590@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...

>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).

We can, so why not our ancestors? I read once that some Polynsian women dive
with a wooden spatula, which they use to prevent molluscs from closing their
shells.

> - 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 ?

OK.

> - 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.)

:-) Yes, but these mussels are open of course.

> 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

:-)

Thanks a lot, Richard!

--Marc