Earliest Scots Braved Ice Age Conditions

[Klingan]

During the last ice age, Scotland was likely a desolate place covered by glaciers, but new evidence suggests intrepid settlers braved the elements by establishing a community there as early as 13,000 years ago.

 

The determination, published in the latest British Archaeology, further suggests the earliest Scots shared a common ancestor with the first Norwegians, meaning that some people of Scottish descent could be distantly related to modern Norwegians.

 

"So often we hear that conditions in Scotland during the late Paleolithic and early Mesolithic would have prohibited human settlements because the landscape was cold and icy, but now we have to wonder what was actually going on and why people appear to have been living in the area during what is thought to have been a glacial period," Naomi Woodward, who led the project, told Discovery News.

 

Read more here.

[Praebitorae]

Well I am not TOOOO surpraised about this.

I think people lived all over Northern Europe during that specific period .

First ,Iceage or not the weather was as changable as it is now (there where warmer periods within the area we call "Ice age".

Second, some area's are simply warmer than others related to ther geographical situation and hightlocation.

Sea or Gyser near area's for example.

Third, many groups ventured from warm place to warm place to survaive.

Fourth,the people of those times where adepted to the climat. situation they lived in.

 

In Scandinavia people also remained during the Ice age.

[caldrail]

I think reports like this are misleading. It gives the impression that settlements were permanent, when in fact these people may have lived there for a short period before being forced elsewhere by conditions. Living on the ice sheets would have been an extraordinary achievement. You couldn't fish - the ice was up to a mile and a half thick in places - so what else could you have caught up there? Now obviously people living in those circumstances would have left little trace. When the great melt finally came, any sign of their habitation was washed away in the huge torrents of water. Caves provide shelter - human habitation from these periods are commonly found - but they needed to be exposed in order to be useful.

[Faustus]

During the last ice age, Scotland was likely a desolate place covered by glaciers, but new evidence suggests intrepid settlers braved the elements by establishing a community there as early as 13,000 years ago.

 

The determination, published in the latest British Archaeology, further suggests the earliest Scots shared a common ancestor with the first Norwegians, meaning that some people of Scottish descent could be distantly related to modern Norwegians.

 

"So often we hear that conditions in Scotland during the late Paleolithic and early Mesolithic would have prohibited human settlements because the landscape was cold and icy, but now we have to wonder what was actually going on and why people appear to have been living in the area during what is thought to have been a glacial period," Naomi Woodward, who led the project, told Discovery News.

 

The Ice sheets weren't as limiting to life as it might seem. The thickness of the Ice, though much thicker

[caldrail]

The Ice sheets weren't as limiting to life as it might seem. The thickness of the Ice, though much thicker 'up-lobe" was fairly thin at the edges, even down to nothing at the front edge. Thicker ice, would 'fall' gradually forward because of gravity, reaching the front or edge where ablation took place. There, because the ice surface is facing south, it would be more directly struck by the suns rays causing melting and melt-water to flow during the warmer months into the adjacent valleys.

You have got to be kidding me. In britain during the last ice age there were cliffs of ice a mile high stretching across southern england - roughly where the M4 motorway is today. Thats accepted by researchers of this period. Now whilst I accept there must have been some ablation or break-away, the fact is the ice was a forbidding barrier with very little to live on up there.

 

Since the slopes are known today, by calculating the differences of only 300 hundred eight feet of mean elevation in 130 miles down slope, it could be assumed that ice will flow around higher terrain with only a few hundred feet of relief when encountered, and will maintain a gradient of less than about 5-hundrenths of one percent over great distances, down slope.

Yes, you can assume that, but thats only an assumption. That may well have been the case early on in the freeze, but in england the ice got very thick very quickly. We're much further north than generally assumed, somewhere on the latitude as Labrador.

 

The slope would be less if the area under the glacier was depressed by weight of ice. This would visually be a very level surface, While we are accustomed to visualizing a mountain of ice at the front, a thousand or so feet high, there, it was rather low and flat. In Scotland, if mildly mountainous terrain, a person could easily stand well above the ice flow.

In conditions that are arctic to say the least without the resources to support them. Life on a freezing mountaintop doesn't strike me as worth the effort, nor are the remans of human habitation found there. Invariably the human remains are at much lower elevation in places and periods where the ice did not obscure them. The ice age wasn't one long freeze, there were warm periods in between and at least once britain had a climate similar to modern africa for a while.

 

The greatest problems for people would've likely been from the melt-water, which would have been a flood during warm months, denuding the land of vegetation.

Now that I do agree with. Where I live, where the edge of the ice cliffs were, the terrain is scoured by ancient watter channels, now somewhat eroded and at first sight not too obvious. The Marlborough and Labourn Downs are hills that have been cut deeply by meltwater - northwards too in some places which is interesting and a sign that the end of the ice age wasn't a general retreat, but left huge buttes of ice in places.

 

Rocky terrain which I believe prevails in Scotland, would have coped better with that condition than in flatter areas like here, and would have some very nice, comfortable southerly facing valleys just a little further away from the glacial front.

For brief periods, remembering that the glacial flow was building up rapidly in response to changing climate and falling temperatures.

 

Remember, too, that the glaciers were in full retreat 13,000 years in the past, so that their retreat presented opportunities for people of that period if they were any type of hunter/fisher.

The glaciers were in full retreat from 13,000 years ago, and the floods from meltwater must have made travel into these regions somewhat hazardous. Most human populations however preferred to live out in Doggerland, the surface of the north sea which was dry land until rising sea levels drowned it 8000 years ago. Settlements have been found off the coast of britain, and remains of steppe animals regualrly get pulled up from the sea bed. In fact, people went upland into southern england mostly because they were forced too, as the living on the river deltas of doggerland was infinitely easier than land recently reclaimed by nature with sparse fauna and flora.

[longshotgene]

I believe you guys discredit the human race a little too much. Have you ever heard of the Inuit people? The Inuit live in purely icy conditions. They live off of raw meat from seals, or fish. Hence the derogatory name white people have given them, "Eskimos". I think the people would have been a little more nomadic than permanent, but that is my opinion. The Inuit brave temperatures up to 75 below zero. The original inhabitants of Scotland, which most likely were not Scots, would have done the same.

[caldrail]

I believe you guys discredit the human race a little too much. Have you ever heard of the Inuit people? The Inuit live in purely icy conditions. They live off of raw meat from seals, or fish. Hence the derogatory name white people have given them, "Eskimos". I think the people would have been a little more nomadic than permanent, but that is my opinion. The Inuit brave temperatures up to 75 below zero. The original inhabitants of Scotland, which most likely were not Scots, would have done the same.

Wrong. The inuits are an exceptional people I've no doubt, but they live in an area of relatively thin ice over a sea packed with marine life. Now I relaise there was some opportunit for this lifestyle around the coasts of ice age scotland (and modern scottish seals are there because of this climatic blip - their pups are born white for camouflage) but the problem is such a lifestyle leave little evidence. Its possible, but no confirmation, and I doubt was there was a widespread culture of hunting like the inuits because our folk history preserves nothing like that. Thats clutching at straws I know, but the hard evidence is that ice age brits made use of temporary shelters built from whatever they could find or caves. The remains of polar bears and such have been found and these would date from times when the area was relatively free of ice but still very cold - during the change from warm to cold or back again? Most of these areas were low lying and prone to being underneath ice flows. Not all were according to my research though, and there are some caves in scottish valleys that show habitation in cold conditions. Now all of this means your arguement has merit but I have to say I doubt they lived the same way or hunted in exactly the same fashion as the modern inuit. I can't prove that - its just a gut feeling. I'm going back into the material I have on this and I'll see what I can dig up.

 

However - the fact remains that during the ice expansions the british isles were very forbidding places. People tend to gather where resources are plentiful and the tundra of what is now the north sea bed (now called Doggerland) offered a far easier existence - at least for the warmer part of the year.

 

That said, its all the more likely that these scots were present during the periods the ice wasn't. Is there any way of checking the dates with the find?

[Gaius Octavius]

How do the people of present day Russia (European and Asiatic), Scandinavia. and Greenland affect your thinking?

Edited October 14, 2007 by Gaius Octavius

[ASCLEPIADES]

However - the fact remains that during the ice expansions the british isles were very forbidding places. People tend to gather where resources are plentiful and the tundra of what is now the north sea bed (now called Doggerland) offered a far easier existence - at least for the warmer part of the year.

 

That said, its all the more likely that these scots were present during the periods the ice wasn't. Is there any way of checking the dates with the find?

Salve, Amici.

 

The reported date is 13,000 years ago.

 

Anyway, Pitts and Wickham-Jones seem to be thinking more on reindeer hunters; more of a Sami-like culture than the Inuit.

Edited October 14, 2007 by ASCLEPIADES

[caldrail]

Britain was on the edge of ice age europe and a stronghold of neanderthals rather than cro-magnons. Now I should make clear that the ice expanded slowly (it didn't appear overnight) and there are periods in the ice ages where although britain is a very harsh place to live, it isn't always buried. Reindeer hunters are possible during those periods, and the as the ice expands the animal population moves further south since there's little chance of surviving on it. We see polar bear remains unearthed in london and oxford, and these beasties must have been among the most northerly of the creatures toughing it out in frigid england (though the remains mentioned might not have been the most northerly of those).