It looks like Homo sapiens headed to the beach and engaged in ‘modern behaviours' such as eating seafood, making delicate knives, and grinding up shells to make paints some 40,000 years earlier than previously known (there's a host of stories on this today, see for example the New York Times and BBC).

The earliest previous evidence for human use of marine resources was dated to around 125,000 years ago (followed by evidence of Neanderthals cooking shellfish in Italy about 110,000 years ago). Now Curtis Marean and colleagues report in Nature findings from a sea cave in South Africa suggesting people were living on the coast there around 164,000 years ago (Nature paper subscription needed; press release). The authors propose these coast-dwellers may have been driven to seafood to survive a cool, dry spell that turned most of Africa to desert.

I have always thought that coastal living was one of the easier ways of life – with plentiful food, water, and a more moderate climate – so had assumed that early peoples would have flocked to the shore. But apparently the prevailing wisdom is that the earliest modern humans (some 150,000 to 200,000 years ago) preferred hunting inland game. “Shellfish was one of the last additions to the human diet before domesticated plants and animals were introduced,” team leader Marean (sadly pronounced 'mar-e-an' rather than ‘marine') told the NY Times.

The African press doesn't seem to have done much with the story, though Reuters Africa reports: For early humans, a beach party and clam bake in S.Africa.