56 THE DOMESTICATION OF ANIMALS 



the surface of the clay of the Fifty Foot Beach in the Tay 

 Valley at Blair Drummond in Perthshire, and bones have 

 been found in the deposits which have yielded Neolithic 

 dug-out canoes in Rutherglen near Glasgow. Adtually as- 

 sociated with the handiwork of men of the Polished Stone 

 Age, skulls and bones have been found in caves and shell- 

 mounds on the Ayrshire coast, in kitchen-middens, as in 

 Oronsay and in the MacArthur Cave at Oban, as well as 

 in the chambered or horned cairns of late Neolithic Age at 

 Canister, Ormiegill near Ulbster, Garry whin near Clythe and 

 Hill of Bruan, all in Caithness, and in a chambered cairn at 

 Loch Stennis in Orkney. 



In Scotland, then, the Celtic Shorthorn appeared in the 

 Neolithic period, shortly after the first settlement of man in 

 North Britain, and this, together with the fact that its re- 

 mains are most frequently found in deposits accumulated 

 on the sites of human habitation, point to its presence as a 

 domesticated animal which had followed in the train of the 

 men of the Polished Stone Age from the regions of the south. 



There can be no doubt of its close relationship to man 

 in subsequent ages, for its remains have occurred in almost 

 every prehistoric site of occupation which has been excavated 

 in Scotland. In the Bronze and Iron Ages, which together 

 extended to the beginning of the Christian era, it was 

 common, and the numerous herds of cattle, "pecoris, magnus 

 numerus," observed by Caesar on his arrival in Britain just 

 before the first century of our era, and remarked upon in 

 his Commentaries, belonged to this race. According to Pro- 

 fessor Boyd Dawkins, it was the only breed in existence 

 in Britain at the time of the Roman Conquest. In spite of 

 the fact that the Romans almost certainly brought with them 

 new races of cattle from the Continent, the Celtic Shorthorn 

 still predominated in Roman and Romano- British settle- 

 ments in Scotland, as at Newstead near Melrose, Traprain 

 in Haddingtonshire and Inveresk near Musselburgh, and 

 remained for long the only domestic cattle of the native 

 population. Its importance as food to the inhabitants of 

 Scotland during or shortly after the period of Roman occu- 

 pation is indicated by the contents of the refuse-heap of a 

 cave at Borness in Kirkcudbrightshire, excavated in 1875, 

 for there the recognizable ox-bones numbered 1 1 12, as con- 



