The stone age in Scotland / [Armand Donald Lacaille].

  • Lacaille, A. D. (Armand Donald)
Date:
1954
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The stone age in Scotland / [Armand Donald Lacaille]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    to congeners of these people, to whom is ascribed a flake-implement of flint (Fig. 2, no. 2) recovered from boulder clay in Eskdale near Whitby.1 These discoveries represent the most northerly advance of the Middle Palaeolithic folk. The records of subsequent events at Creswell were very similar to those prevailing on the Continent with which they may have synchronized. Thus, as the climate became milder, Middle Palaeolithic man gave way to repre- sentatives of Homo sapiens in the Upper Palaeolithic stage of cultural development. 7. THE UPPER PALAEOLITHIC AGE Although southern and eastern England were now open to continuous human occupation, these regions were nevertheless influenced by sub- sequent readvances of the ice. Scotland, however, as the principal centre of these later movements, had still a long glacial history which was intimately bound up with that of the English north country, Wales, and Ireland. Upper Palaeolithic hunters followed migrating herds across the land- bridge from the Continent, and small groups of them became scattered over south Britain. In time, bands in successive late stages of Aurignacian culture reached north-east Derbyshire. The Gravettian equipment of some of the last of these folk are found reinforced with Proto-Solutrean forms. At Creswell the relics of the earliest arrivals have been discovered with the remains of reindeer, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, arctic hare, and variable hare. This type of fauna is suggestive of severe conditions. Later there came the horse, bison, red deer, and reindeer, an association which indicates climatic variations and seasonal migrations. Cold conditions apparently predominated, but man was able to make casual sojourns at open sites in north Lincolnshire. Changes of sea-level connected with advances and retreats of the ice may have intermittently cut the direct communication with the Continent.2 Hence, though reinforcing elements reached Britain, they infiltrated so slowly that by the time Magdalenian industries were flowering in France, after a return of cold following less uncongenial conditions, the relatively restricted area technically known as the English province had evolved an independent but basically Aurignacian culture. 1 R. A. Smith, 1922, p. 22; Elgee, 1930, pp. 36-37. 2 Wright, 1937, p. 295.