SCOTLAND AS MAN FOUND IT 9 



fuller and rounder than ours, the bridge of the nose and 

 nostrils moderately narrow, and their eyes rather narrow and 

 elongated. Their jaws were square and their front teeth, 

 instead of overlapping as do ours, met firmly edge to edge. 

 So regular and healthy were their teeth, a necessity for a 

 primitive life, that they show only a wearing down due to 

 constant use, and seldom or never any signs of the decay 

 or caries which has given rise in our generation to armies of 

 dentists and the science of dentistry. 



The earliest traces of these primitive peoples in Scotland 

 are associated with the so-called " Fifty-Foot Beach." 

 Their canoes, simple dug-outs of pine, have been found at 

 Perth in the Carse clays of this period, and frequently in 

 similar deposits in the Forth and Clyde valleys. Some of 

 their implements were left beside the remains of a whale, 

 stranded in these far-off days on a shore which is now part 

 of the fertile Carse of Stirling, and, as Dr B. N. Peach has 

 pointed out, their kitchen-middens lie along the ridge of the 

 Fifty- Foot Beach in the upper reaches of the Forth, never 

 occurring in the lower seaward ground a clear indication 

 that at the time the refuse heaps accumulated, this Beach 

 was the limit of high water whither the kitchen-middeners 

 retired to feast upon the shell-fish collected at low tide. 



THE PHYSICAL CONDITION OF SCOTLAND 



What, we must ask, was the Scotland in which the 

 Azilian or Early Neolithic peoples settled after their wander- 

 ings through Britain from the continent of Europe ? As 

 compared with its condition at the present day, the land 

 was depressed relative to sea-level, all the shore area that 

 lies beneath a contour-line varying in -different areas from 

 35 to 65 feet being submerged by the ocean. Where the 

 coast is bounded by high cliffs, this depression would have 

 had little effect on the outlines of the country, but where the 

 land shelves gradually to the sea, as in many parts of the 

 Moray F'irth and in the great valleys of the Tay, Forth and 

 Clyde, the sea made considerable encroachments upon the 

 land. So it is that while the Fifty-Foot terrace is generally 

 represented on the west coast, as in the islands of Jura and 

 Mull, by a comparatively narrow ledge, cut in the cliffs by 



