ARCHAEOLOGISTS have discovered that humans walked the land on a Scottish estate some 3,000 years earlier than previously thought.
Experts carrying out excavations at Mar Lodge in Aberdeenshire have produced radiocarbon dates which show hunter-gatherers were at the area deep in the Cairngorms as far back as 8100BC.
The work by teams from Aberdeen and Stirling universities, University College Dublin and the National Trust for Scotland suggests some places were revisited over many thousands of years.
The earliest dates found by archaeologists come from a site in Glen Dee, at a key stopping point for travellers moving through the highest points of the mountain, between Deeside and Speyside, with links back to north-west Scotland and the North Sea coast.
They also worked at a site in Glen Geldie and found radiocarbon dates of around 6100BC which coincides with at a time when permanent snow fields would have covered the part of the Cairngorms and glaciers may have started reforming.
Dr Shannon Fraser, an archaeologist for the National Trust for Scotland in the North East, said: "It is incredible to think that what we have discovered at this one spot in a vast landscape may represent a small group of people stopping for only a night or two, repairing their hunting equipment and then moving on.
"Glen Geldie is a very chilly place today, even with all our modern outdoor clothing - it is hard to imagine what it must have been like in the much harsher climate 8,000 years ago."
The National Trust for Scotland said the excavations have revealed a complex history of settlement, showing that people gathered by the riverside thousands of years ago, perhaps only a few hundred years after communities began to move back into Scotland when the ice retreated.
The work at Glen Dee suggested people were in the area as early as 8100BC and they continued to flock to the sandy beach - at a point ideal for salmon fishing - until the late bronze age, around 900BC.
The latest work follows the discovery in 2003 of more than 80 pieces of worked flint and quartz dating from the Mesolithic age at a site in Glen Dee near Braemar. The stone tools were found during conservation work on footpaths.
Without radiocarbon dates, only an approximate date for the artefact could be possible and initial estimates had suggested the tools had been around since 5000 BC.
Experts have said that the tools prove that people moved through the landscape in seasonal cycles gathering and hunting food.
As well as this a further study at that time, funded by Aberdeenshire Council, found that both tool making activities and the use of the tools themselves were happening at the site.
The universities later teamed up with the National Trust for Scotland to form the Upper Dee Tributaries Project in 2013 to learn more about how people used the estate after the retreat of the last glaciers.
Bruce Mann, Aberdeenshire Council archaeologist, said: "Not so many years ago we thought we understood the glens of the Cairngorms, as a landscape largely empty of people in prehistory.
"Now this work has turned such thinking on its head, and shows the importance of why we support these projects. In the future we'll be better informed about how we manage that land, while providing an amazing story for visitors to the area."
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