8 INTRODUCTORY 



between that and the definite later stages of the Palaeo- 

 lithic epoch. These earliest inhabitants of Scotland were 

 hunters, fowlers and fishers. They possessed no domestic 

 stock and there is no evidence that they tilled the ground 

 or .cultivated corn. Yet their craft furnished a well-stocked 

 larder, as their kitchen-middens and other relics in Scotland 

 show 1 . They gathered from the sea-shore in great variety 

 edible shell-fish crabs, and mollusca such as limpets, whelks 

 or buckies, periwinkles, mussels, oysters, cockles, scallops 

 and razor-shells. The foreshore and sea-cliffs supplied them 

 with many kinds of birds wild-ducks, geese, shags and 

 cormorants, great auks, razorbills, guillemots and gannets. 

 From coastal waters they obtained dog-fish and rays, sea- 

 breams, wrasses and the conger-eel ; and by the river-banks 

 and woodland glades they trapped and slew the otter, 

 red deer and wild boar. Nor did they disdain the blubber 

 and the flesh of whales and dolphins which fortune stranded 

 on their coasts, or the seals which basked and bred there in 

 abundance. 



Of the personal appearance of the early settlers we can 

 form a just estimate from examination of the skulls and 

 other bones which have been preserved underground in the 

 neighbourhood of their habitations at the MacArthur Cave 

 near Oban, or of the relics in the horned and chambered cairns 

 which the successors of the Oban fishermen, the men of late 

 Polished Stone or Neolithic Age, built in scattered localities 

 from Galloway to Caithness and the Orkneys, to protect 

 and commemorate their dead. They were a short people, 

 their thigh-bones suggesting that the men stood about 

 5ft. 4 Jin. high, and the women about 5ft. i in. some 2 or 3 

 inches below the standard of a modern Briton. Their lower 

 limbs differed from ours and resembled those of some of the 

 more primitive races of man at the present day, with thigh- 

 bones flattened, shins compressed from side to side, and the 

 bones of foot and ankle more compact and stouter all 

 adaptations for strong and rapid movement, indicating that 

 the people lived an active strenuous life. In facial ex- 

 pression, they differed only in small degree from ourselves. 

 Their heads and faces were long and narrow, their foreheads 



1 The following account contains references to such animals and plants 

 only as have been identified in Scottish deposits of the periods mentioned. 



