20 INTRODUCTORY 



human meals, near Ardrossan on the Ayrshire coast, there 

 have been discovered many specimens of a top shell, Trochus 

 lineatus, which is now extinct in the Firth of Clyde. The 

 contents of other kitchen-middens show that other species, 

 such as Oysters, were common in localities where they no 

 longer occur, and that, on the whole, the forms used by 

 Neolithic man for food were larger than their present-day 

 representatives in the same neighbourhood. 



Probably too, the Neolithic seas of Scotland swarmed 

 with herds of the larger mammals, such as can scarcely be 

 imagined near our coasts, now that man has persecuted and 

 slaughtered for centuries. At any rate, remains of Finner 

 Whales (Balanoptera) have been found in the Carse clays 

 to the west of Stirling, in some cases associated with imple- 

 ments of man's creation, and in situations many miles west 

 of any point accessible to whales, even were they likely to 

 venture nowadays towards the head of the Firth of Forth. 

 Nor can it be doubted that Seals of various species bred on 

 many islands and rocky portions of the coast-line which they 

 have long deserted, and that the Walrus, half a dozen 

 individuals of which were seen at different times on the 

 coasts of Scotland and its isles even so late as the first half 

 of the nineteenth century, was in Neolithic times a frequent 

 visitor, and may even have bred on the northern coasts. 



SUMMARY 



Partial and incomplete as our survey of early Scotland 

 must be, it yet affords a reasonably accurate picture of the 

 country when Neolithic man the long-headed, square- 

 jawed, short but agile-limbed hunter and fisherman 

 founded his most northern settlements in the British Isles 

 9000 or more years ago. It was a country of swamps, low 

 forests of birch, alder and willow, fertile meadows and snow- 

 capped mountains. Its estuaries penetrated further inland 

 than they now do, and the sea stood at the level of the 

 Fifty-Foot Beach. On its plains and in its forests roamed 

 many creatures which are strange to the fauna of to-day 

 the Elk and the Reindeer, Wild Cattle, the Wild Boar 

 and perhaps Wild Horses, a fauna of large animals which 

 paid toll to the European Lynx, the Brown Bear and the 



