What's surprising about it is the degree of specialisation in local resources, from which we can infer that these people were living within relativel… - Judith Sealy

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.

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.

It is true that many burials were isolated interments in scattered localities, but other caves also contained large numbers of graves--Whitchers Cave, for example. Unfortunately, this was excavated early in the twentieth century, and most of the remains recovered have been lost. We are interested in what the placement of graves meant to the survivors, and how this fitted in with peoples' concepts of the landscape.