Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/260

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252
PREHISTORIC BRITAIN

Gulf Stream. Under these circumstances the reindeer would instinctively move northwards until it reached the north of Scotland where, according to historical evidence, it lived up to the twelfth century A.D. What is more natural than to suppose that some of the Palæolithic people of the south of England followed the dwindling herds of this animal as far as Caithness, where they have left some of their skeletons and traces of their transformed culture habits in the pre-Neolithic shell-heaps described by Laing and Huxley. Others of these "river-bed" wanderers found their way into the inland sea in the upper reaches of the Forth valley, where they came in contact with the famous school of stranded whales. Others pushed on till they reached the west highland lochs and islands, where they obtained abundance of food supplies in the luxuriant marine and land faunas of that district. No polished stone implements, or any worked objects characteristic of the Neolithic civilization, have hitherto been found on any of the sites inhabited by these primitive people.