Читать книгу The Isles of Scilly - Rosemary Parslow - Страница 26

During glaciation, land south of the ice sheet would have been bare tundra, cold, with sparse vegetation and probably few animals (Yalden, 1999), and certainly few that are still found in Britain today. It is difficult to imagine what Scilly was like at the time of the earliest human visitors, who were probably Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who left only a few flints as evidence of their passing. We have already seen that the islands would have been a considerably larger landmass than the present-day scatter of islands. Much of the land was covered in birch woodland, sparse grassland and marshy land with sedges. These conditions of the Mesolithic period persisted across southern Britain, then part of Continental Europe, and most of the steppe species that were present then have either died out or retreated to more northerly areas. During the Neolithic period people may have started to settle in Scilly and begun clearing the land, but pollen evidence shows some forest clearance was followed by woodland regeneration and agricultural decline. There are a few artefacts from this time, but it is likely these were only temporary occupations (Ratcliffe & Johns, 2003).