In a year of boiling heat, freezing cold and unpredictable storms, exploring the earliest arrivals to the British Isles after the British-Irish Ice Sheet had receded, the environment had changed and sea levels had risen substantially is more relevant than ever. The latest thinking is that after the chilly Younger Dryas period of the 12th millennium BP, and a smaller cold snap called the Preboreal Osciliation (c. 11,300 - 11,050 BP), any Upper Palaeolithic groups in the British Isles were wiped out, or at least reduced to so small a number as to not make any impact. Mesolithic hunter-foragers, coming from Germany and southern Scandinavia via the submerged forest landscape of Doggerland, arrived in an empty land at the tail end of this cold snap in the north of England, following lakes and coastlines, while another culturally-contiguous group arrived from the south, across the daunting Channel River, a few centuries later.
What this means, however, that there were a few centuries that remnant Palaeolithic peoples and new Mesolithic arrivals could have met each other. The archaeology points to the first foragers arriving about 11,250 BP, or in the 94th century BCE. When they made landfall on the island, they moved rapidly, already flaking off blades and hunting game on the Isle of Skye as early as 10,950 BP, less than ten generations. On of the key areas they settled was the Vale of Pickering, home to the settlement of Star Carr, where before 9000 BCE an elk skull was deposited in the palaeo-lake of Lake Flixton. These watery, forested places were not the domain of the previous occupants of Britain, who were still largely big-game hunters and felt more at home on the plains than in the marshes. The last gasp of the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle is evidenced at the open-air site of Howburn Farm in Scotland, where a Late Upper Palaeolithic group from Scandinavia, probably crossing the shallow straits between the Aberdeen coast and western Norway where one or multiple islands would have acted as stopping-points, were working hides and processing carcasses around 12,000 BP.
While the last Palaeolithic and the earliest Mesolithic communities in Britain may have been genetically close and practices similar hunting techniques, as well as perhaps sharing a base vocabulary, the incomers had a radically new set of beliefs and a distinct mode of settlement. South and south-eastern scotland might have been one place where they could have overlapped, especially as Morton, beside the Tay, and a handful of other sites have on typological grounds been dated back to 9000 BCE. The blades at these sites are close in form to the finds from Howburn and other LUP sites, apart from being smaller, more refined and amongst newer stone technologies. While this points to a common origin in LUP northern Germany (the Hamburgian and Ahrensburgian cultures) for both societies, since these blade technologies lasted in Britain for so long, it could instead suggest cultural exchange between surviving LUP hunters and the new arrivals. On the other hand, no Mesolithic site has LUP-style blades directly alongside microliths and bone implements, which would directly imply exchange or assimilation.
A cluster of sites on the North Yorkshire coast, between Holderness and Skipsea, have recovered Palaeolithic-looking flints, and trawlers have occasionally brought up similar lithics from the coastal banks. This tells us at least that LUP hunter-gatherers were moving to and from Doggerland, and visiting watery places which the first Mesolithic people later came to. Potentially, then, the first foragers came to Britain on hearsay from local big-game hunters in western Doggerland, enticed by an exaggerated abundance of elk, deer and other big animals.
Britain's coastline around 9500 BCE, with reindeer migration routes labelled. These directions would have been critical for late Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, particularly the Ahresnburgian-derived cultures of northern Germany, Scandinavia, Scotland and northern England. After Green 2015.
In the south of England, Mesolithic groups from the continent came independently from their northern cousins, probably skirting the Channel river to first encamp somewhere along the Thames estuary. The earliest site known so far is at the old Eton rowing course, near Windsor, where a flint assemblage comes from a context probably as early as 9100 BCE, although some undated flints from Thatcham may be a couple hundred years older. One of the major differences between the southernerns and the northerners was the dependence on wild pigs, which was common in the south and unheard of in the north, who preferred aurochs.
Like in the north, however, the last Palaeolithic groups here tended towards the coast and rivers and away from their traditional big-game terrain; a sign that the times were changing. Despite their differences, the Ahrensburgians and Hamburgian hunters - who were the last Palaeolithic people in the British isles, with the exception of a French hunter-gatherer group in western Ireland - were not in a different technological dimension to the first Mesolithic people. The transition from one era to the next was much more a continuum, a trend toward smaller, more composite tools and a lifestyle around marine resources, than a sharp break with the past.
Overall, the introduction of the Mesolithic in the British Isles was not simply a straightforward scenario, with foragers repopulating a ghost landscape. At the time, the average forager would not have distinguished those they may have interacted with as they moved inland as technologically backward, or inferior; the only difference would have been the animals they hunted and how they went about hunting them. It could well be that the reason for the dissapareance of Late Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers is because at the end, they moved away from caves and towards more fauna-rich forests, an environment were any activity would leave very few archaeological traces. Generally, there aren't many deep caves in the lowlands of eastern Britain, and there would'nt have been many in Doggerland, but this doesnt meen that Paleoithic people were just not there.
References:
Ballin, T. B., Saville, A., Tipping, R., & Ward, T. (2010). An Upper Palaeolithic flint and chert assemblage from Howburn Farm, south Lanarkshire, Scotland: first results. Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 29(4), 323-360
Conneller, C. (2022). The Mesolithic in Britain: Landscape and Society in Times of Change. Routledge.
Dowd, M., Bonsall, J., Kahlert, T., Connolly, R., & Stimpson, C. (2021). Revisiting Alice and Gwendoline Cave, Co. Clare: new light on the 1902 excavations. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature, 121(1), 1-53.
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