Years ago, my husband and I spent time exploring an ancient microlithic site near the Mosel River on the southeast coast of South Africa. Among the sprawling granite rocks, and with the sounds of the ocean and the drama of the mighty Agulhas crashing on the pebbly shores behind us, we came across tiny handcrafted tools lying discarded in the sands.

And like the gulls circling above us, drifting on the currents of the wind, so our imaginations drifted into the past and to a time when hunter-gatherer communities lived along these shorelines, crafting these intricate tools that would ultimately innovate more composite tool technologies – and eventually, the sophisticated hunting weapons of later periods.

I remember the feeling of sitting in the hot, salty African sun, the air fragrant with the scent of wild buchu, holding an intricately crafted blade in my hand, the working edge so precise, and imagining it as a complex tool, attached to a wooden handle using some wild resiny substance, and how this invention would have enabled these people to live more efficiently and effectively in their strandloping worlds.

Then, as the sun began to dip towards the horizon, we looked more closely at the ground, and lying concealed between the dry windswept grasses growing amid the sandstone deposits of millennia, we found delicate ostrich eggshell beads. And again, holding them in our hands, knowing that perhaps it had been thousands of years since they were last touched, filled us with awe and wonder; and it was also tremendously humbling knowing that the beads were symbolic of a time when people lived in harmony with nature, when the ostrich eggs were used to store water, that most precious of earthly gifts, and the beads themselves a daily reminder of a reverence for the life-sustaining role of water in life - just that sense that their lives were intricately bound to nature in an almost sacred bond.