10. The People—Race, Language, Population. The blood of the people of Aberdeenshire, though in the main Teutonic, has combined with Celtic and other elements, and has evolved a distinctive type, somewhat different in appearance and character from what is found in other parts of Scotland. How this amalgamation came about must be explained at some length. The earliest inhabitants of Britain must have crossed from Europe when as yet there was no dividing North Sea. They used rough stone weapons (see p. 114) and were hunters living upon the products of the chase, the mammoth, reindeer and other animals that roamed the country. Such were _palaeolithic_ (ancient stone) men. Perhaps they never reached Scotland: at least there is no trace of them in Aberdeenshire. They were followed by _neolithic_ (new stone) men, who used more delicately carved weapons, stone axes, and flint arrows. Traces of these are to be found in Aberdeenshire. A few short cists containing skeletal remains have been found in various parts of the county. In the last forty years some fifteen of these have been unearthed. From these anthropologists conclude that neolithic men lived here at the end of the stone age, men of a muscular type, of short stature and with broad short faces. They were mighty hunters hunting the wild ox, the wolf and the bear in the dense forests which, after the Ice Age passed, overspread the north-east. They clothed themselves against the cold in the skins of the animals which they made their prey and were a rude, savage, hardy race toughened by their mode of life and their fierce struggle for existence. They did not live by hunting alone; they possessed herds of cattle, swine and sheep and cultivated the ground but probably only to a slight extent. Their weapons were rude arrow-heads, flint knives and flint axes; and a considerable number of these primitive weapons as well as the bones of red-deer and the primeval ox—_bos primigenius_—have been recovered from peat-mosses and elsewhere throughout the district. Such have been found at Barra, at Inverurie and at Alford. Besides these remains, have been found urns made of boulder clay, burned by fire and rudely ornamented. These were very likely their original drinking vessels, afterwards somewhat modified as food vessels, and were, it is supposed, deposited in graves with a religious motive in accordance with the belief common among primitive peoples that paradise is a happy hunting-ground in which the activities of the present life will continue under more favourable conditions.