Forensic reconstruction of British Mesolithic Cheddar Man after DNA analysis ( Mark Richards)
The Mesolithic inhabitants of Britain and Ireland were genetically similar to the so-called Cheddar Man, and were descended from hunter-gatherers who had colonised the Northern European plains after the last Ice Age. Although the genes of these early peoples can still be found in modern populations of Sami, Finns, and Estonians, they were almost completely replaced in Britain and Ireland after these islands were colonised by the people of the Atlantic Façade.
Mesolithic hunter-gatherers
While Britain, Ireland, and a large area of land in the North Sea called Doggerland were still attached to continental Europe, they were all part of a culture called the Creswellian, named after an extensive hunter-gatherer cave site in Nottinghamshire. Their ancestors had made a living by following herds of mammoth and reindeer across great swathes of post-glacial tundra, but as climate change brought warmer, wetter weather, some groups established settlements along the rivers and coasts, where they grew into sometimes large and prosperous marine-based communities who also hunted and foraged in the spreading woodlands. The resulting settled population growth enabled some complex social and technical traditions to develop, and the use of river travel opened up the higher, more densely forested areas where game management was practiced in artificially created woodland clearances.
Some Mesolithic sites had substantial permanent living accommodation, like the large communal dwelling found at Howick in Northumberland that was in continuous use for around 100 years, while one at Star Carr in North Yorkshire appears to have been constructed purely for rituals or ceremonies centred around stag-hunting.
Mesolithic deer-mask from Star Carr
(Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology)
But a variety of ritual or ceremonial activities were apparently practised by the Mesolithic British and Irish. For example, around 9,500 years ago a settlement was constructed at Blick Mead on the then forested Salisbury Plain around a freshwater spring containing algae that turned the water red when exposed to air, and nearby, on the later site of Stonehenge, a large timber-post structure was arranged in an east-west alignment, possibly tracking the patterns of sunrise and sunset.
A study published in 2013 describes the earliest known ‘astronomic calendar’ constructed around 10,000 years ago at Warren Field in Aberdeenshire. This timber circle, like the much later Stonehenge, tracked the phases of the moon and was also aligned with a prominent point on the south-east horizon associated with the midwinter solstice. This enabled the viewer to link lunar months with the solar year and associated seasons, and it was maintained and periodically reshaped for 6,000 years in response to shifting solar/lunar alignments. Luni-solar 'time-reckoner' (University of Birmingham)
Separation from continental Europe
Post Ice-Age coastline changes of Britain, Ireland, and Doggerland (Frances Lima)
Post Ice-Age global warming resulted in melting icecaps and gradually rising sea levels, which started to separate Doggerland, Britain, and Ireland from the rest of the European continent. But it is now known that a dramatic event in western Norway known as the Storegga Tsuami, resulted in the sudden flooding of many North Sea coastal areas.
Around 8,000 years ago a huge part of Norway’s continental shelf collapsed, releasing the catastrophic tsunami which has also been linked with a dramatic tidal inundation from a breached lake in North America. The giant wave flooded vast areas of coastal North Atlantic and North Sea, washing away many Mesolithic settlements and the whole of Doggerland. A 2015 study found that the tsunami hit in Autumn, when people would have been returning to their seashore settlements after inland summer hunting, leaving survivors to face the winter without shelter, tools, or families.
The Storegga Tsunami (Speigel Online)
It was soon after the Storegga Tsunami that the earliest northern European stone structures began to appear along the north Atlantic coast, structures now known to have been erected by a newly identified group of seafarers that originated in the Near East.
References:
V. Gaffney et al. 2013 Time and a Place: A luni-solar 'time-reckoner' from 8th millennium BC Scotland', Internet Archaeology 34. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.34.1
The New Discoveries at Blick Mead: the Key to the Stonehenge Landscape. www.buckingham.ac.uk. University of Buckingham.
Knut Rydgren; Stein Bondevik . Moss growth patterns and timing of human exposure to a Mesolithic tsunami in the North Atlantic. Geology (2015) 43 (2): 111-114. https://doi.org/10.1130/G36278.1
See also:
The disappearing genes of Britain and Ireland
The Atlantic Façade comes to Britain and Ireland
Bronze Age Beaker Folk come to Britain and Ireland