PANALBA

The Age of the Spear

Dave McNicoll 11/23/2009 04:52 AM

Click image to enlarge

Scots pines Glen Lyon

When we last left Scotland in my ‘Anthology of a Nation' she had emerged from one of the longest and deepest Ice Ages in the planet's history; a trauma that left its mark indeed. North to south, east to west the landscape would bear the hallmarks of ice erosion and deposition: from the fjords of the west coast, the U-Shaped valleys of the Highlands and the Borders, the drumlins of Glasgow and thick fields of sand and gravel in the Central Belt, a new picture had been painted. Then came the grasses, plants and finally trees, and with this arboreal advance came the animals. Essentially, you need to think of Britain 8,000 years ago as a great huge forest, interspersed in the south by grassland and meadow and in the north with heather mountains rising above the tree line. Here was the kingdom of bear and wolf, a land where elk, boar and lynx roamed free and fish thronged the swift rivers of the east. A late new-comer to the land would change this world forever: enter our ancestors.

Recent archaeological discoveries have now revealed that people were living in southern Scotland at least as long ago as 14,000 year ago, just as the last of the glaciers were melting in the north. The land would still have been pretty harsh, more like the tundra of Siberia than the grasslands of Europe, and it is likely that these hunter-gatherer peoples were seasonal migrants from the south, possibly following game north as the short summers came in. Even during the Ice Age, the summers were fairly habitable to reasonable latitudes: the North Sea basin was a huge grassy meadow thick with Mammoths, Aurochs (prehistoric cattle), Reindeer and Bison. This abundance of potential food would have been too good an opportunity for our ancestors, and perhaps the evidence found near Biggar is reflective of this seasonal hunt.

As the climate began to warm in earnest 10,000 years ago, so people began their inexorable march north in search of new hunting grounds and new opportunities. Where they came from is a pretty broad canvas, but they were almost certainly drawn from hunter-gatherer tribal groupings stretching from the Pyrenees to Germany; some arriving while the land-bridge between England and Europe existed, others by boat, either across the North Sea or up the Atlantic coastline of Ireland and western Scotland. They were almost certainly the descendants of the original Homo Sapiens Sapiens arrivals in Europe some 50,000 years earlier - famed for their cave paintings in places like Lucerne and Cro-Magnon. The vast northern ice sheets and fiercely cold continental winters saw the population barely able to survive, and saw many adaptations to the physiology - long noses, pale skin, increased body hair, blue eyes, and so on. Some were for obvious survival reasons - we need sunlight to produce Vitamin D, the low solar levels in the north needed an adaptation to pale skin to allow for greater absorption. Others, like red hair and blue eye colouring are probably genetic by-products of other genes being ‘switched on'.

The earliest known sites of occupation in post-glacial Scotland are all coastal - Rúm, Crammond and the Firth of Tay, which is hardly surprising. The sea and the rivers were the highways of their day. What you need to do is imagine a couple of hunters on their way back to camp, say canoeing up the Tay, or down the Moray Firth, in the same way as we watch Amazonian Indians on modern TV documentaries, surrounded by a vast, thick impregnable forest until they come to a clearing and their camp. Scotland was covered much the same thickness of forest, and these clearings, close to open water, next to fresh running water and near an abundance of game and edible / usable plant-life were obvious camp choices. That said, these early Mesolithic (middle stone age) inhabitants of Scotland were nomadic - although they probably didn't travel huge distances between camps, and were so isolated that they may have had to deliberately arrange formal meetings with other clans simply to prevent gene-pooling.

Virtually all of the known early camp sites are in remote places, like Rúm, simply because the land has been relatively undisturbed for all those years, yet it is more than likely that the main camp sites are today buried deep below our big towns and cities. Medieval settlements were established for more or less the same reasons as Mesolithic camps, so it stands to reason that places like Perth, Inverness, Glasgow and Aberdeen, each with a specific advantageous geographical setting would have seen nomadic campsites 7500 years ago. At that time the total population of Scotland may have been no more than 1000, with most tribal units comprising three or four families with numbers ranging between 20 and 80 (it is hard to sustain hunter-gatherer community integrity with more than that even today). Their diet and range would have varied with the seasons, but there was plenty to choose from: Red deer, boar and Capercaillie in the forest, Salmon and trout in the rivers, hares and ptarmigan in the hills; plus berries, fruit and mushrooms a plenty to supplement a fairly meaty diet. Their hunts would have brought them into close proximity to bears, wolves and lynx, but instead of being on their menu, our forebears hunted them for their skins and furs. The forest itself provided the wood for spears, axes, bows and shelter making, the wood was burned in the fires and the charcoal used in paintings and drawings. It was a wonderfully sustainable way of life, and one that offered a life expectancy close to 70.

Although our Mesolithic forebears would have known and used tracks and routes through the forest, perhaps penetrating deep into the wood - especially where the bigger rivers such as the Tay and the Spey made it possible - they would have very little impact on the woodland itself. Certain areas would have been fired and cleared for campsites, and to prepare traps (and perhaps for communal religious purposes as well), but the great forest's ability to quickly regenerate would negate any adverse effects.

Precious little archaeological remains are ever preserved from hunter-gatherer sites, as they mostly used timber and moved around rather than settling in one spot; and much of our understanding is conjecture, often based on looking at modern, and near modern cultures with a similar way of life. All that we are generally left with are middens (rubbish heaps - which allow us to interpret their diet, and possible modus operandi for hunting and gathering) and charcoal from long since dead fires. Yet for all that, we can probably paint a fairly accurate picture of life, certainly as the Mesolithic gave way to the Neolithic farming period around 6000 years ago.

Like many studied hunter-gatherer and aboriginal societies, our ancestors would have had a fairly rigid and well organised social structure, with a head-man, elders and matriarch. Modern concepts of marriage and so on would have been pretty alien, but the ideas of ‘pairing' for life are as old as the Ark and would have likely been adopted by this society - as would the notion of ‘marrying' off sons and daughters to neighbouring tribes for alliances, and the existence of a harem is fairly probable if not universal. Men between puberty and infirmity would be expected to be involved in hunts, whether in the planning or the application, and the elders would have ruled on all matters from where to hunt to the timings to move camp, and when to make contact with others. The women would have looked after the day to day running of the camp, prepared the food and clothing, brought up the children and collected the fruits and berries. That said, women were not treated as subordinate, but as an important and key part of the tribe - indeed perhaps even more so than men due to their child-bearing abilities: it is impossible for us to imagine the sheer importance of a new born child to a tribe of only 50, and the future sustainability of the clan. If, in their religion, they worshiped anything it was probably a female mother earth goddess entity. And religion would have played a huge part in the life of the tribe.

At no stretch of anyone's imagination can we really understand what people believed and how they contemplated the world around them, and indeed their own mortality; but I think with some certainty that they did at least do the contemplating. Since time immemorial human beings have questioned their place in the world and what happens once we shrug off this mortal coil, and our distant ancestors all those millennia ago would have been no different. I doubt that there was any organised religion in the way we understand it, but a structure of some sort would have been in place, with its own ritual and etiquette: after all, 30,000 years earlier Cro Magnon peoples were painting not only flora and fauna on their caves, but images that require a degree of mental detachment and understanding of an ‘other-world'. Like many other similar cultures, the Mesolithic people of Scotland would have feared, worshiped and relied upon their forest, coastline, river and meadow - and therein lived their gods. Not only the tangible, but the ethereal also - the sun, moon stars and comets would have played an important part in the life cycle, as did the tides, the seasons and other phenomena we take so for granted today. A knowledge of the seasons, or changes in the environment was of vital importance for the survival of the tribe as anything, and as such great reliance was placed on the know-how of the elders and of course the all important Shaman.

Many things would change with the arrival of farming and the technology it brought to Scotland, not least the environment that had been so valued, but I think that much of the old beliefs and ideas would transcend this change, would be adapted and put centre-stage in the new Scotland, and one that may still be with us today in many a folk tale and story. A distant folk they may have been, and little have they left us on the ground, but their blood and DNA has carried though the generations to us in our modern world so far removed; and much, much more.