Cynthia Barnett - The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans

Contents

The
SOUND
of the
SEA

Seashells and the
Fate of the Oceans

Cynthia Barnett

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

Independent Publishers Since 1923

To my Mom, Gerry,
for a lifetime of seashells.

We can have a surfeit of treasuresan excess of shells, where one or two would be significant.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

CONTENTS

The
SOUND
of the
SEA

O ne hundred thousand years ago, a human cousin walked a rock-ribbed beach along the Mediterranean Sea, her head lowered and her large eyes scanning the shoreline. Now and again she stopped, bent her strong body, and picked up a seashell.

Among the polished whorls and sturdy half-shells washed ashore a couple miles from her cave, the Neanderthal girl knew precisely what she was looking for: cockle shells of a certain size and shapeabout an inch across, perfectly round, and with a natural hole in the top.

She was picky about the hole, too. She collected those shells with eyelets she deemed best for threading. Her appreciation for seashells beyond food, and her imagination to string them together for a necklace or some other intention, would help scientists overturn nearly two centuries of assumptions and poorly conceived science that Neanderthals were dim-witted brutes.

The cockle shells gathered in Neanderthal times were discovered fused into the maw of a sea cave overlooking Spains Cartagena Harbor. Several other shells found in the cave from the same era had been harvested live, for eating. Archaeologists could tell from their unblemished contours that theyd never bumped along the rocky shore.

The cockles had tumbled onto the beach empty. Someone collected them intentionally, but not for food. One keeper seashell, from a bittersweet clam, had been painted red. Another, from a thorny oyster, had a long second life as a cosmetic case. It still held a reddish pigment hand-ground from bits of hematite, pyrite, and other minerals, none found naturally in the cave.

These eons later, the powder still sparkles. And the girls human cousins are still picking up seashells.

WHEN I READ about the Neanderthal shell cache, I wondered whether the collector could have been a child. I imagined a young girl about five. That was my daughters age when, during a beach weekend on the east coast of Florida, she became obsessed with collecting only those shells with perfect holes in the top, for stringing necklaces and driftwood mobiles.

Those were the Bead Years in our house. In precisely ordered tackle boxes, she amassed colored beads and clear beads, owl beads and Scottie-dog beads, alphabet beads to spell out her friends names and Iu. Now, as we slowly walked a bank of shell and seaweed sculpted by the high tide, that same collectors gene was switched on at the Atlantic Ocean. Her fixated silence amplified the breaking waves beside us, the scold of gulls above, and the clink, clank, clatter of shells into her purple sand bucket. She skipped the shining olive shells, sharks eyes, and other coiled prizes pressed into the wet sand. Like our ancestor, Ilana chose rounded half-shells: orange Atlantic cockles, purple-striped calico scallops, and scads of pendant-sized surf clams with hard-candy stripes and colors, all with a little round hole in the top.

When shed chosen all she wanted, she wrote her name in big letters in the sand, along with the name of our town a couple hours inland, as if signing a seashell invoice from King Neptune.

Ten years later, those shells are still stashed here in our landlocked town, in a heavy little bag pushed to the back of a cabinet in my study. Theyve been tucked there since I rescued them from a pile of household detritus my husband was about to toss for spring cleaning.