Timeless coastal track

A walking trail by the sea like this one is among the few manmade features in natural landscape left unchanged since the days of the early humans and their ancestors. Mobility was then a vital asset in finding food. Today electronic transactions and prompt home deliveries make people forget the demands of hunting and gathering.

The risk pattern has also changed but not disappeared, for the hunter-gatherers are still among us. They knock on doors, test back windows without making a sound or lie in wait along unprotected trails.

Few walk here harbouring thoughts of gathering something to eat and they shouldn’t. For this is a reserve where wildlife and whatever is edible from the sea are protected, i.e. prohibited to remove. Outside the reserves there are also rules for what may be gathered, how much of it and during which seasons.

The act of searching and eating bonds all participants with a long line of predecessors who did exactly that right here and elsewhere. Some participants are of course not human (but edible), while pre-humans and early ancestors walked here, although the records are sketchy.

They all ate (about) daily and fed their offspring until those were independent. This continued without a single break to deliver us after so many thousands of generations later that the number can never be determined.

Still, the earth obliged and fed them all. It is up to us, now that we’ve come of age, to help ensure that the earth retains its ability to feed those that live on it.