The Evolutionary Roots of Blue Heritage

The South African coastal record for modern human origins is world renowned for documenting early and complex forms of behavior and culture during the origins of modern humans. It is well documented in the ethnographic record that aquatic hunter-gatherers differ significantly from terrestrial hunter-gatherers in a variety of ways that line up with the complexities of this South African coastal archaeological record. Here, I summarize a hypothesis that posits that the movement into the aquatic niche transformed early modern humans in significant ways and laid the evolutionary foundations for the intensely cooperative and periodic sectarian species in full display in our modern world, and set the stage for the Great Human Diaspora. The first steps toward humanity’s Blue Heritage occurred on the rocky and sandy shores of South Africa, and set in motion the “historical and contemporary human cultural attachments to the sea” (Boswell, O’Kane, Hills 2022) explored in this book.