For more than a century, archaeologists assumed that no humans lived in Scotland during the last Ice Age—but new evidence has proved them wrong, and this project will finally dig into what that human presence actually looked like. The problem is that Scotland’s Late Pleistocene archaeological record is extremely sparse: a handful of sites, few artefacts, and a research tradition that actively dismissed the possibility of pre-Holocene settlement. Recent discoveries of unequivocal Late Upper Palaeolithic sites have shattered that perceptual barrier, but the evidence remains thin. PALaEoScot will address this gap by combining biomolecular and isotopic analyses of animal remains with computational modelling of past environments, landscapes, and human dispersal routes. The goal is to reconstruct the living landscapes of Ice Age Scotland and understand how pioneer populations, animals, and cultures recolonised this extreme north-western edge of Europe after the glaciers retreated. This is fundamental, curiosity-driven research. It has no immediate practical application for infrastructure or industry. But similar work on low-visibility archaeology has reshaped our understanding of human resilience and migration in harsh environments—insights that could inform how we think about human adaptation to future climate change. More directly, it will illuminate cultural and biological connections across now-submerged areas of northern Europe, rewriting the prehistory of the British Isles.
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Despite a long-standing fascination with the 'Antiquity of Man', the evidence for human life in Ice Age Scotland is sparse and under researched. A low-density of archaeological finds has been compounded by a research tradition that has persistently excluded the possibility of human settlement at the extreme edge of north-west Europe prior to the start of the Holocene (c.11,700 yrs ago). This is at odds with palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironmental data and, indeed, the recent discovery of unequivocal Late Upper Palaeolithic sites has provided indisputable evidence for human activity in Late Pleistocene Scotland. Now, with the perceptual barrier of more than a century lifted, the combined study of Scotland's Late Glacial palaeoenvironments and landscapes, and the humans and animals who recolonised those changing worlds, offers vast and unrealised potential: to better understand pioneer populations, explore behavioural flexibility and resilience, and illuminate cultural and biological connections across the now-submerged areas of northern Europe. However, in order to understand the human past where little conventional archaeological evidence belies an undoubted human presence, new approaches are required. PALaEoScot will examine the history of research into Scotland's deeper past and unearth new archaeological evidence for the nature of human activity, society and culture in the Late Pleistocene. Employing a unique archaeo-ecological approach centred on the animals that shared and shaped the human past, we will employ cutting-edge biomolecular and isotopic analyses to reconstruct Scotland's Late Pleistocene living landscapes and - using computational modelling to integrate palaeo -environmental, -ecological and archaeological data - will explore the constraints and potentials of contemporary human dispersals. PALaEoScot will illuminate human and animal life in north-west Europe at the end of the Last Ice Age and create new ways of approaching low visibility archaeology.
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