‘If you roast them you can grind them down to a paste and then it becomes easy, nutritious food you
can carry away and use later.’
The scale of the operation is staggering, though – as if every last hazel nut on the island had been collected in one go. ‘It shows they weren’t just living from day to day,
scraping an existence,’ Mithen added. ‘It was really carefully planned activity.’
On nearby Oronsay the team has found evidence that shellfish were being collected from the shallows on the shoreline and then consumed invast quantities. The scale is
testified by enormous mounds – middens – of empty shells carefully heaped and piled in one place. People returned to exactly the same spot year after year, perhaps generation after
generation, to gather and eat mussels, limpets, dog-whelks, periwinkles and the like before deliberately adding them to the midden until in time it would have been visible from the sea, a great
white pile of shells. Maybe it was a territorial marker as well – a sign to tell any passing strangers that these islands were already known.
Although the tip of a fishing spear made of red deer antler was found at Fiskary Bay, there are no red deer on Coll. The species was not on the island in the Mesolithic period and has still not
reached the place today. By contrast Islay, a larger island to the south, has always been a rich hunting ground for deer and would have been yet another stop on the shopping trip made by Mesolithic
people as they systematically obtained all they needed from the world by using boats and canoes to link many islands together into a single territory they understood intimately.
Seeing that territory, learning how it provided for every human need like some Garden of Eden, makes it hard not to envy the lives lived in that cradle. There were undoubtedly hardships. Times
when the fish did not come to Fiskary Bay, or the natural harvest of hazelnuts failed to ripen on the trees and bushes. Random fate, injury and disease too would lead to suffering like that
experienced by Cheddar Man. Imagine toothache in a world without dentists.
And yet for all that, something about the Mesolithic world of self-reliance sounds tempting and the call of it can be heard like a distant voice. As a species we lived as hunters for almost the
sum of our existence on this planet. Only during the last 10,000 years at the very most has anyone thought about farming – and all that that way of life brings. For the preceding two or three
million years we hunted, and the hunt still cries out to us.
On the mudflats of the Severn Estuary, at Goldcliff near Newport in south Wales, the hunt speaks with a human voice – many human voices dimly heard. Mesolithic people came here to this
shoreline 8,000 years ago and more. Some of them collected shellfish, or checked fish traps. Children ran along by their mothers’ sides, scattering flocks of seabirds into sudden uplifting
flight. Elsewhere, the men of the tribe ran swift and silent in pursuit of deer and other prey sheltering in the reeds and long grass by the shore.
We know all of this – about the mothers and children, the birds and animals, the hunters – because they left behind the imprints of their feet. As people
walked and ran on the soft wet silts at the water’s edge, and as birds hopped and deer and other animals picked their way, telltale prints were left in their wake. At the end of some
long-forgotten day, the tide rolled in and muddy waves gently filled the foot shapes with a layer of silt. By lucky chance the same process was repeated with every tide that followed until the
trails left by humans, birds and animals were sealed, undamaged and perfect, beneath countless thin skins, like the build-up of a laminate.
Later still the shape of the estuary was altered by a change in the route of the River Severn, and the layers containing the footprints were suddenly left behind on dry land. Peat began to form
on top of
can carry away and use later.’
The scale of the operation is staggering, though – as if every last hazel nut on the island had been collected in one go. ‘It shows they weren’t just living from day to day,
scraping an existence,’ Mithen added. ‘It was really carefully planned activity.’
On nearby Oronsay the team has found evidence that shellfish were being collected from the shallows on the shoreline and then consumed invast quantities. The scale is
testified by enormous mounds – middens – of empty shells carefully heaped and piled in one place. People returned to exactly the same spot year after year, perhaps generation after
generation, to gather and eat mussels, limpets, dog-whelks, periwinkles and the like before deliberately adding them to the midden until in time it would have been visible from the sea, a great
white pile of shells. Maybe it was a territorial marker as well – a sign to tell any passing strangers that these islands were already known.
Although the tip of a fishing spear made of red deer antler was found at Fiskary Bay, there are no red deer on Coll. The species was not on the island in the Mesolithic period and has still not
reached the place today. By contrast Islay, a larger island to the south, has always been a rich hunting ground for deer and would have been yet another stop on the shopping trip made by Mesolithic
people as they systematically obtained all they needed from the world by using boats and canoes to link many islands together into a single territory they understood intimately.
Seeing that territory, learning how it provided for every human need like some Garden of Eden, makes it hard not to envy the lives lived in that cradle. There were undoubtedly hardships. Times
when the fish did not come to Fiskary Bay, or the natural harvest of hazelnuts failed to ripen on the trees and bushes. Random fate, injury and disease too would lead to suffering like that
experienced by Cheddar Man. Imagine toothache in a world without dentists.
And yet for all that, something about the Mesolithic world of self-reliance sounds tempting and the call of it can be heard like a distant voice. As a species we lived as hunters for almost the
sum of our existence on this planet. Only during the last 10,000 years at the very most has anyone thought about farming – and all that that way of life brings. For the preceding two or three
million years we hunted, and the hunt still cries out to us.
On the mudflats of the Severn Estuary, at Goldcliff near Newport in south Wales, the hunt speaks with a human voice – many human voices dimly heard. Mesolithic people came here to this
shoreline 8,000 years ago and more. Some of them collected shellfish, or checked fish traps. Children ran along by their mothers’ sides, scattering flocks of seabirds into sudden uplifting
flight. Elsewhere, the men of the tribe ran swift and silent in pursuit of deer and other prey sheltering in the reeds and long grass by the shore.
We know all of this – about the mothers and children, the birds and animals, the hunters – because they left behind the imprints of their feet. As people
walked and ran on the soft wet silts at the water’s edge, and as birds hopped and deer and other animals picked their way, telltale prints were left in their wake. At the end of some
long-forgotten day, the tide rolled in and muddy waves gently filled the foot shapes with a layer of silt. By lucky chance the same process was repeated with every tide that followed until the
trails left by humans, birds and animals were sealed, undamaged and perfect, beneath countless thin skins, like the build-up of a laminate.
Later still the shape of the estuary was altered by a change in the route of the River Severn, and the layers containing the footprints were suddenly left behind on dry land. Peat began to form
on top of
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