Fascinating Stone Age discoveries may rewrite Scotland's history

While unearthing a Neanderthal skeleton may be the Holy Grail, right now the Aberdeen University archaeologist is focused on revolutionising our understanding of life here in Scotland in the far distant past. Along the way, she’s discovered proof of ‘mega-bears’ in Scotland at the time of our most ancient ancestors. That’s a career-high in itself. But it’s only the start for Britton.

Until just a few years ago, the accepted wisdom was that there was no evidence of humans in Scotland before what’s known as the Mesolithic period, about 10,000 years ago.

However, a paradigm shift came when Stone Age tools discovered in Scotland, previously thought to date from the Mesolithic period, were revealed to be from much earlier. These flints, like spear points, came from the Palaeolithic period, and are around 14,000 years old. That pushes back the date for the earliest humans arriving in Scotland by thousands of years.

Britton has now received £1.7 million in funding from the European Research Council to uncover what the lives of these earliest ‘Scottish’ people were like. The quote marks around the word ‘Scottish’ are key. The notion of Scotland, Britain or Europe was meaningless to our ancient ancestors. The funds Britton now has are, in archeological-terms, a huge sum. “It’s almost unbelievable,” she says. It’s the kind of money academics get for designing the Mars Rover, Britton explains.

Her work, which begins in September, will completely change how we think of the Stone Age in Scotland. Until around 2010, Britton says, there was really no archeology covering the Palaeolithic era in Scotland at all. Palaeolithic just means Old Stone Age and Mesolithic means Middle Stone Age.

Kate Britton feeding a reindeer in the Cairngorms – although wild reindeer went extinct in Britain long ago, the Cairngorm herd are a free-roaming herd of domestic reindeer that were imported to Scotland from Sweden. Image: Kate Britton)

ICE AGE

The lack of any substantial detail on life during Scotland’s Paleolithic period was primarily down to the Ice Age. The conventional wisdom was that Scotland was just too cold back then for humans to live here. That’s why, she says, “the archaeological story of Scotland begins in the Mesolithic”.

Archeologists found plenty of Stone Age tools from the Mesolithic over the years, but nothing from the much earlier Palaeolithic - seeming to confirm the hypothesis that humans didn’t arrive here until about 10,000 years ago.

However, around a decade ago everything changed. That’s when a handful of tools were uncovered which archeologists realised couldn’t be Mesolithic. They had a much older design. They were Palaeolithic. And they were in Scotland.

The finds made sense: by about 15,000 years ago, Scotland was “largely ice free”, Britton explains. The environmental conditions were actually “quite nice”. We also know there were animals, like reindeer, roaming Scotland’s Paleolithic landscape from the archeological record. Migrating animals were followed seasonally by hunter-gather tribes in the Stone Age. Proof of this early human habitation in Scotland was “hiding in plain sight,” Britton says.

Neanderthals Revealed - The Neanderthal woman as re-created by the Kennis brothers, photographed in and around Asturias, Spain on April 26 & 27, 2008.

The Palaeolithic tools number only in their tens - not even hundreds - and come from sites like Howburn Farm in South Lanarkshire. Most are fragmentary and no larger than two or three inches. They appear to be the tips of spears and objects like scrapers used to prepare food: essential parts of any Stone Age toolkit.

The archeologists who forged the link between these few, broken bits of stone and the Palaeolithic period made Britton’s research possible. “I’m standing on the shoulders of giants,” she says.

However, what’s still missing are any remains of Palaeolithic humans. We’ve a few of their tools, to prove they were here, but no skulls or skeletons. Britton is now hunting Palaeolithic bones. She’ll use the most sophisticated science available to scour the ground for even the smallest remnants.

She’ll also search for cut marks on animal bones to pinpoint where and how Palaeolithic humans lived in Scotland, using electron microscopy, and reconstruct the fauna of the period to paint a picture of the landscape they inhabited.

Kate Britton sampling a reindeer metacarpal (limb bone) to undertake radiocarbon dating. Radiocarbon dating, a method utilised by archaeologists to accurately date archaeological bones and other materials, will form a significant part of the PALaEoScot

SOUTHERN-CENTRIC

There’s an additional intellectual conundrum she wants to unravel: why did it take so long for us to realise humans lived in Scotland much earlier than believed?

There’s the rather uncomfortable possibility, Britton thinks, that the Victorians who pioneered archeology were somewhat “southern-centric”. They may have simply considered Scotland too cold and harsh for humans to have settled here in the Stone Age. Britton says there was a sense that “northernness equals bad”, that Scotland was “wild and you can view that in a barbaric and negative way, or you can romanticise it”.

Victorian archeologists, she says, seemed to believe “civilisation begins in the south”, not just in a global context, but in a British sense as well.

It’s rather ironic that Britton is the woman to undo nearly two centuries of study which got Scottish archeology so badly wrong: she’s English.

Kate Britton sampling sediments for ancient DNA analysis at archaeological site Rubha Port an t-Seilich, Islay, during an excavation led by project collaborator Prof. Steve Mithen (University of Reading). The analysis of ancient DNA from archaeological

DISCOVERY

“Up until very recently, we didn’t have a Paleolithic in Scotland at all”. As we now know “there were people here in that period - let’s investigate it,” says Britton. Given there was no acceptance of the fact that humans lived here in the old Stone Age, the Paleolithic period languished from lack of interest. “But now the gauntlet has been thrown down for discovery because our own perceptual barriers have lifted,” she adds.

Britton and her team will also be trawling through the archives of the National Museum of Scotland (NMS). There’s heaps of neglected artefacts in its vaults which she could use to cast new light on the past: finds that were thought to be from the Mesolithic but may actually date from much further back in the Paleolithic. She says her work would be impossible without the support of Dr Andrew Kitchener, from NMS, opening up the collections to her.

Trying to understand the animals that lived in Scotland during the Paleolithic will help us understand our human ancestors: not just what they were hunting and how they ate, but also the style of their culture and even ‘religion’. They had an intense relationship with wildlife far beyond the realm of modern imaginations.

Dr Andrew Kitchener (Principal Curator of Vertebrate Biology, National Museum of Scotland) holds the complete maxilla (upper jaw) of a cave bear, comparing it to a sizeable fragment of bear maxilla from the Assynt Bone Caves. Radiocarbon dating has

DOGGERLAND

Understanding the movements of these animals will also explain where these Paleolithic ‘Scots’ came from, Britton says. In this period, Scotland, and England, were linked to continental Europe by Doggerland, a vast swathe of land which later sank beneath the North Sea.

If animals were migrating from what’s now mainland Europe, across Doggerland and into England and Scotland, then our early settlers probably followed the same route. “We’ve got evidence from stone tools of possible cultural connections to southern Denmark and northern Germany,” Britton says, with artefacts showing distinct similarities.

Reindeer remains have been found in Assynt ‘bone caves’. “Were these reindeer migrating across Doggerland?” Britton asks. Examining ancient flora and fauna remains will also reveal an approximate date for when Scotland became habitable as the ice sheets retreated.

So Britton is using the landscape, animals, plants and human artefacts to build a portrait of what life in the Paleolithic Stone Age - a period that’s basically blank - really looked like for our ancient ancestors. It’s an incredible feat of detection given there’s so little evidence to go on. “It’s almost the archeology of the invisible,” she says.

BONES

So why have no human remains from the Paleolithic yet been found? Scotland, it seems, “represents a real challenge” for archeologists. We don’t have that many cave systems, which are really good at preserving remains. Our soils are also acidic and “just love to melt bone”, Britton says. Nor does the country have many deposits of flint, so ancient humans would have mostly used other materials - like animal bone and antlers - which also get ‘melted’ in acid soils. “It’s a perfect storm of poor preservation conditions,” she adds.

The most prized finds for Britton will be human remains from the Paleolithic. She’ll be using mass spectrometry on tiny fragments too small to be identified as human bone by the naked eye. The team will also use a technique called ‘sedimentary DNA’, where samples of soil are scanned for microscopic signs of any creature preserved there.

Caves found with remains of Paleolithic reindeer will be investigated. “It would be wonderful if we found homo sapiens,” she adds. Cut marks - signs of butchery - on animals bones dated to the Paleolithic will also help explain where and how humans lived in Scotland at the time.

There’s every chance the team will uncover species of animals and plants not known to have existed in Scotland before. At the time, there were wolves, horses and bears in Scotland as well as reindeer. Mammoth were last in Scotland around 35-40,000 years ago.

MEGA-BEAR

From digs at Assynt ‘bone caves’, Britton uncovered what was initially thought to be part of the skull of a Cave Bear. This would have been an incredible find. Cave bears died out about 25,000 years ago and were last in Scotland thousands of years before that. But what she did find was just as unique: a skull part - the maxillary bone from the upper jaw - of what’s called a ‘mega-bear’.

“It’s massive,” Britton says. “Basically a giganticised brown bear … that’s probably slightly larger than a cave bear”. It dates from around 15,000 years ago, so could have walked the land when those very first Paleolithic settlers arrived in Scotland. Britton’s work will establish “if people were around at exactly the same time”.

We can already build a vague picture of the kind of people who were here in the Paleolithic. The few stone tools we have from them are similar to those made by people from what’s known as the ‘Hamburgian culture’. They lived around 15,000 years ago as well in what’s now modern Germany. This fits with the hypothesis that they crossed into Scotland via Doggerland.

“Animals were a very vibrant part of their socio-cultural framework,” Britton says. “I don’t want to use the word ‘religion’ as it implies something I don’t quite mean but their world was furnished with symbolic depictions of animals. Animals formed a core part of their identities, lives and experiences.” There’s been ancient finds showing Stone Age people wore reindeer head-dresses and carved images of humans with lion faces.

TRIBES

Paleolithic hunter-gathers would have moved seasonally in small groups of perhaps 50, but interacted with other ‘tribes’. The life cycle of salmon in Scotland may have played a part in the travels of Paleolithic people. “Animals form a rhythm in the landscape that humans worked with,” Britton adds.

As ice sheets retreated, opening up Scotland, all these animals - bears, reindeer, wolves - would have been “pioneers into a new world too” along with the humans who depended on them. As the land warmed, “opportunities were revealed and animals and humans alike fill this space. It’s less about being brave and going into the unknown, and more about moving with the opportunities … You can also think of it in terms of this: if all your friends went somewhere wouldn’t you go there too?”

Is she saying animals were seen by humans as ‘friends’? “Yes, that’s almost exactly what I’m alluding to,” she explains. Britton doesn’t mean that animas and humans “chummed about together”, but rather that ancient people put animals on an equal footing, not simply as the food or pets we see them as today. “We view nature as separate from our lives.” Ancient people occupied a “different psychological space” when it came to animals. They interacted with animals all the time, culturally animals were “dominant” in the minds of early people, whereas we feel humans ‘dominate’ the animal kingdom.

Perhaps our ancestors had the much more healthy view of the world than us? Post-industrial revolution western culture has “homogenised” life, she says.

Another possible reason for just how little we know about Scotland’s Palaeolithic Stone Age is that archaeology has tended to focus on the ‘macho’, Britton suggests. Indiana Jones-type archeologists - “largely male” - were most interested in evidence of humans hunting big creatures like mammoths. In Scotland, that evidence didn’t exist, due to our complex conditions. It’s proof of how the mindset and pre-occupations of modern humans shapes how we study the past.

NEANDERTHALS

Radiocarbon-dating reindeer remains in Assynt bone caves to some 30-35,000 years ago - during a period that was “pre the ice sheet” which would eventually go on to cover the country - hints at the possibility of discovering the greatest imaginable find in Scottish archeology: proof that extinct Neanderthals once walked the land here.

Clearly, if reindeer could make it to Scotland during this period of warmer weather, so could humans. And so could Neanderthals. We know Neanderthals made it as far as the English Midlands around 50,000 years ago - so why would they not journey a few hundred miles further north where conditions were still habitable in what’s now Scotland?

Finding Neanderthal remains is complicated by the fact that later movement of ice sheets basically “scoured the land”, says Britton. However, given the warmer climatic conditions, she adds: “If the question is whether humans were in Scotland 40,000 years ago, I’m not entirely sure why not - if you’ve all these animals living here, why not?”

Neanderthals could well have been alive until perhaps 25,000 years ago. It’s not “stupid at all”, says Britton to suggest Neanderthals may have made it to Scotland in this warmer period.

The concept of Neanderthal life has evolved enormously in just a few generations. Previously, they were considered brutish and stupid. Now, we know they had art and a sophisticated culture, buried their dead, and made jewellery and musical instruments. They also cared for the sick, old and disabled.

INTERBREEDING

Britton feels that the unfair - and crucially inaccurate - depiction of Neanderthals as stupid and primitive is down to modern humanity’s sense of superiority. Neanderthals were first discovered during the era of colonialism when European and American “othering” of non-white races, let alone extinct human relatives, was the order of the day.

The dismissal of Neanderthals “chimes with that late 1800s outlook”. Today, though, the “pendulum has swung and Neanderthals are seen as being more at one with nature, and we’re the ones who messed up the planet”.

“Ice Age humans would have been just as ‘wild’ - not my term - as Neanderthals,” she adds. The notion that Neanderthals were “savage”, Britton goes on, “says more about us than them”.

The acclaimed geneticist Svante Pääbo decoded the Neanderthal genome at the world-famous Max Plank Institute in Germany, where Britton studied during her doctorate.

We now know that billions of humans have some Neanderthal DNA in them, with Europeans carrying the most, around 2%. It’s proof that our ancient homo sapiens ancestors “interbred” with Neanderthals. The two species probably met around 60,000 years ago during one of humanity’s pushes out of Africa. Neanderthals would subsequently begin to go extinct.

GENOCIDE

The coincidence has fuelled the belief that our ancient ancestors exterminated Neanderthals, perhaps committing humanity’s first great crime of genocidal violence. However, Britton doesn’t hold to that opinion. Certainly, she doesn’t believe that we caused their extinction in an “intentional act”. There could well have been “inter-species aggression in the same way there was definitely inter-species affection. I’m sure there would have been combat, and that Neanderthals were just as capable as us of making enemies”.

and humans may have fought over resources, but humanity’s first genocide? “No, I don’t think there’s evidence for that.” Deadly diseases could have passed from humans to Neanderthals. Broadly, archeological thinking now holds that multiple factors finished off the Neanderthals.

Around 60-30,000 years ago, there was as much chance of humans going extinct as Neanderthals. “It could have been us as well as them … The more interesting question is: what if it was Neanderthals who came out on top? Would they have done what we have to the planet? But that’s the kind of conversation you have over a pint late at night.”

And is it even accurate to say that Neanderthals are extinct, she asks. After all, a significant portion of our DNA is Neanderthal. They live on in us.

Another intellectual failure is found in the way we lump all Neanderthals together. We look at Neanderthals in the Middle East from 100,000 years ago in the same way as we look at Neanderthals in Spain 25,000 years ago, she says. “They were 75,000 years apart.” We’d never look at ancient human cultures in that same slap-dash fashion.