Evidence of seal-clubbing in ancient Wales

Mar 19 2008 by Sally Williams, Western Mail

New research shows that early Welsh communities harvested the sea and land in way that has not been found anywhere in Europe for that period.

They were eating lots of marine foods, including fish, sea birds and seal meat.

The seals would have come ashore with their pups, that would have been easy targets for clubbing, making them simpler to hunt than whale.

The settlers could have used their skins for warmth and water proofing too.

And their economy would have been based on the sea, in a similar way to that of the Faroe Islands in more recent times.

More than 13,000 years later, animal rights campaigners shocked the world in the 1970s and 1980s with films of Canadian seal hunters clubbing white-coated seal pups not yet weaned from their mother's milk and skinning some alive. American and European markets folded and forced a virtual collapse of the hunt.

In Wales today, colonies of seals attract tourists keen to catch a glimpse of them basking on the shorelines of Cardigan Bay and Pembrokeshire.