Archaeologists find stone tools left on Islay by hunter-gatherers about 12,000 years ago, long before humans were thought to have been there

Stone tools left by ice age hunter-gatherers who camped out on the east coast of the Scottish island of Islay about 12,000 years ago have been uncovered thanks to a herd of pigs that began rooting up stone implements on the shore.

The finds push the earliest evidence of human activity in Scotland back by more than 2,000 years – it had been thought that the earliest settlers crossed the landbridge after the ice age, about 10,500 years ago – and by 3,000 years on Islay.

The archaeologists, led by Prof Steve Mithen and Dr Karen Wicks from the University of Reading, who said the discovery “took our breath away”, were called in when pigs brought in by a gamekeeper to help clear bracken started to dig up stone tools at Rubha Port an t-Seilich.



The level uncovered by the pigs dated from after the ice age, the Mesolithic era, and the archaeologists had been delighted with the finds in one of the best preserved sites from the period, including the remains of a fireplace, animal bones, plant traces and stone tools.

But a surprise find came on the planned last day of the excavation: one metre down, they uncovered a level almost 3,000 years older, long before any human beings should have been in the region.

Wicks said: “The initial discovery was more swine team than Time Team. Archaeology relies on expert planning and careful analysis – but a bit of luck is also very welcome.”

She said western Scotland, with the highlands covered in glaciers, was the north-west frontier of the ice age world, a landmass stretching across Europe to Asia.

The shape of the broken arrow tips and other tools, and the way they were made, suggests the people came from northern Europe, southern Scandinavia, northern Germany or the Low Countries.

The archaeologists found no sign of a permanent settlement. They believe the ice age hunters probably came in the summer months, using skin boats to navigate the rivers and marshes connecting Britain and the continent, and then continued around the north of Scotland to camp out, hunt and forage in sheltered bays such as those on Islay.



The finds, including a broken stone arrow tip believed to have been used for hunting reindeer, a scraper and another stone tool probably shaped for working bone or antler, could be dated by the helpful layer of volcanic ash sealing the deposits and another layer below them. The dating was done through the technique of tephrochronology, which analyses minute particles of the ash that came from clouds caused by eruptions of volcanoes in Iceland. This determines its unique chemical composition, which can then be matched to a timeline from known deposits, as the chemical fingerprint is slightly different in each eruption.

Wicks added: “The ice age tools provide the first unequivocal presence of people in Scotland about 3,000 years earlier than previously indicated. This moves the story of Islay into a new historical era, from the Mesolithic into the Palaeolithic.”

It’s not the first time creatures have helped with archaeology: the Lewis chessmen are said to have been uncovered in the 19th century by a cow on a beach in the Western Isles, and underwater archaeologists are still working on a prehistoric landscape on the bed of the Solent, first identified when a diver spotted a lobster throwing worked pieces of flint from its burrow.