174 PRINCIPAL SIR WILLIAM TURNER ON 



Anatomy. Associated with the skeleton of a whale found in 1897 at Causewayhead, 

 Stirling, was a part of the beam with a tine fashioned into a pick, and a portion of 

 a whale's rib which seemed as if it had been used as a rude bone implement. The 

 specimen is to be seen in the Public Museum, Stirling. 



The association of these implements with the skeletons of whales justifies the 

 inference that the Neolithic Caledonians of the hills bounding the estuary at that 

 period had descended from their heights and spoiled the carcases of their flesh and 

 blubber. In the basin of the Clyde and in the Carse Clay of the estuary of the 

 Tay, dug-out canoes have been found imbedded in the silt and clay. No human 

 skull or skeleton has, however, been seen along with these evidences of the handi- 

 work of man. 



When the oscillations in the relative level of land and water had ceased and 

 the 25—30 foot beach had become established, evidence of neolithic man in North 

 Britain was greatly multiplied. Implements and weapons of smoothed and polished 

 stone, of finely worked flint, bone and horn, with pottery and ornaments, cairns 



Fig. 1. — Implement. Beam of antler of red deer found in 1877. 



and cists made of rude stone, have been exposed, also mounds containing shells of 

 edible molluscs and the split bones of larger mammals. 



In 1851 Sir Daniel Wilson described skulls preserved in the National Museum 

 of Antiquities and in the Phrenological Museum, Edinburgh, which had been 

 obtained from cists and tumuli in Scotland. In some the cranium was elongated, 

 in others shorter and more rounded. He regarded the longer skulls as the oldest 

 in time of the races which had successively occupied Scotland, and he named them 

 kumbecephalic or primitive dolichocephalic. Arehreologists had not at that date 

 sufficiently differentiated the modes of burial and the characters of the contents of 

 the graves to enable them to state definitely their relative age. Of the nine skulls 

 in Wilson's kumbecephalic group, possessing the elongated form of the cranium, 

 the narrow backward prolongation of the occiput, the narrow interparietal diameter 

 usually less than the vertical, the features which he regarded as characteristic, 

 several had undoubtedly been obtained from interments which wc should now 

 assign to the later period of the bronze age. It would indeed seem as if only 

 one, or at the most two, of these interments could now be regarded as neolithic, 

 though the dolichocephalic proportions of some of the other skulls might justify 

 the inference that they were those of people of neolithic descent interred in 



