Beachcombing

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The beachcombing lifestyle was one originally adopted in the South Pacific during the eighteenth and ninetheenth centuries by Europeans who deserted ship to live with Polynesian peoples of the region.

Beachcombing activities include adopting a lifestyle totally dependent upon coastal fishing of fish and shellfish, searching for items of flotsam that may have value, and often abandonning totally one's original culture and values. Beachcombers frequently "went native", establishing a local family.

In archaeology the beachcombing lifestyle is associated with coastal shell-middens, that may accumulate for many hundreds if not thousands of years. Evidence at Klassies River in South Africa, and Zuli Gulf in Eritrea, show that a beachcombing option is one of the earliest activities separating anatomically modern human Homo sapiens from the ancestral subspecies of Homo erectus that went before.

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