In this area, people were able to choose from a long menu of foods including venison and the meat of other wild animals, berries, edible roots and co… - Judith Sealy

It is often very hard to recognize when similar elements were deployed in different social and cultural systems in the past, as I argue is the case here.

Bone tissue accumulates over many years, so this was a long-term dietary pattern. People buried at Matjes River Rock Shelter, on the other hand, ate much more mixed diets, with more terrestrial food or low trophic level [low on the food chain] marine foods, such as shellfish.

What's surprising about it is the degree of specialisation in local resources, from which we can infer that these people were living within relatively small areas, rather than trekking regularly across large areas of landscape. This is unexpected, given the very mobile lifestyle of most recent southern African hunter-gatherers.