Earliest Humans in Scotland

Flint tools that were discovered in a Scottish field have been dated to 14 000ya. The date provides evidence of the earliest presence of people in Scotland.

Flint finds point to Scotland’s first people Flint artefacts collected in a field at Howburn Farm, Elsrickle, South Lanarkshire, have been identified as dating to 14,000 years ago. Dating from the end of the ice age, they constitute the oldest certain evidence for humans in Scotland, and the most northern evidence for the earliest people in Britain.

Link

The date of 14 000ya coincides with a period when the northern British Isles were connected to northern Europe by a land bridge. There's more information on the BBC.

They are similar to tools known to have been used in the Netherlands and northern Germany 14,000 years ago, or 12,000 BC. They were probably used by hunters to kill reindeer, mammoth and giant elk and to cut up prey and prepare their skins.

I was reading around the findings and found this pdf Biggar Common, 1987-93: an early prehistoric
funerary and domestic landscape etc. and it seems like it's taken all this time for the flints to be dated

Are these more recent discoveries or is ten years a reasonable period of time to acquire this kind of data?

nice post. S&f. previously, i had read it was 11,000yrs ago, but this is way older!!

nice find.

I wonder whether this early date and the land-bridge ties in with Oppenheimer and Forster's theories regarding (very early) English as a branch of German being spoken a lot earlier than the 'Anglo-Saxon Invasion'.

Interesting find.

Archeologists are finding some fascinating aritifacts that are filling in a bit more of history.

Star and flag from me too.

reply to post by Merriman Weir


I think this goes back way earlier than that. 14,000 years ago our ancestors would have been speaking a very different language - perhaps related to Basque (genetics show our ancestors came from the ice age refugia in what is now the Basque region and that we are related to Basques to this day)

Celtic and Germanic languages would only have arrived here in Bronze Age times - in both cases I suspect we adopted the language of a small number of incomers and those we traded with. Perhaps in a similar manner to the way French became our official language after 1066 - though thankfully in that case it never caught on amongst the general populace

Originally posted by Essan
reply to post by Merriman Weir

 

I think this goes back way earlier than that. 14,000 years ago our ancestors would have been speaking a very different language - perhaps related to Basque (genetics show our ancestors came from the ice age refugia in what is now the Basque region and that we are related to Basques to this day)

Celtic and Germanic languages would only have arrived here in Bronze Age times - in both cases I suspect we adopted the language of a small number of incomers and those we traded with. Perhaps in a similar manner to the way French became our official language after 1066 - though thankfully in that case it never caught on amongst the general populace

Yes, I'm aware of the Iberian connection, I've actually mentioned it myself several times on various threads here in the past.