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was all these beasts that were now the focus of human attentions. Away to the north, deep into the tundra of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, the hardiest of the hunters went in search of the bears, Arctic foxes, lynx and pine martens that provided valuable and sought-after furs.
    Cold-climate trees like aspen, birch, juniper and willow had colonised the empty territories first, followed eventually by those species that prefer it slightly warmer, like alder, elm, lime and oak. Gone into the realm of folk memory were the wide-open steppes and the great congregations of animals that once thronged there. Now it was a question of stalking creatures that concealed themselves in the shadows and undergrowth, and the hunting parties that reached as far north as Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia were of precisely the same stock that walked dry-shod into the peninsula that would become the British Isles.
    Strange though it may seem, the new forests and woodlands were home to far fewer animals than had inhabited the steppes, and even the tundra. While the migratory herds had been colossal in number, the deer, cattle and pigs taking refugeamong the trees were far fewer and further between. Likewise the Mesolithic hunters were not only living in a different way to their Palaeolithic predecessors, and in a wholly new environment – they also amounted to a much smaller population.
    When I imagine the life of the Stone Age hunter, I always prefer to picture myself in a forested environment. Accustomed as I am to living most of my life indoors and beneath a roof, I take comfort from the thought of leafy branches overhead and tree trunks in all directions to distract me from the vastness of the outside world. But the truth is, woodland and forests have their limitations when it comes to keeping a family or a hunting group supplied with the stuff of life; they demand from their human customers a considerable amount of discipline and forward-planning.
    The principal problem, with the deciduous forests at least, is the way they shed their leaves and go to sleep during the winter months – that time of year that is hardest anyway. Human population levels were therefore restricted by the amount of food the forests could provide. Even with due attention paid to laying down stores of dried fruits and nuts, smoked fish and meat, the woodland of the European Mesolithic likely supported a smaller, more widely scattered population than had the grasslands and tundra inhabited by the peoples of the Upper Palaeolithic.
    And so it was, for the men and women making their way further and further west and north across the European mainland between 12,000 and 6,000 years ago. The ancient ancestors of the Vikings were hunters of wild game and gatherers of wild foods for thousands of years. For some few of them the pickings in the virgin territories of Scandinavia were rich enough – towards the end of the Mesolithic period at least – to permit the establishment of relatively permanent settlements.
    For long periods before, the people had been entirely peripatetic, moving along the coastlines of Denmark, Norway andSweden, or penetrating the river valleys. All of their movements were dictated by the seasons – by the expectation, in different places at different times, of shoaling fish, or ripening fruits, of nesting birds or land-locked sea mammals. Fish, shellfish, seabirds, marine mammals like seals and walrus, together with the larger fauna that roamed the woodlands nearby were all there to be exploited.
    Archaeologists, like all scientists, are on the lookout for patterns – for similar behaviour shared by people spread across wide areas and existing at more or less the same time. Once they find such clusters, suggestive of many people living the same way, they generally round things up and call it all a ‘culture’. In the case of the later Mesolithic in a zone taking in northern Germany, the northern Netherlands and southern Scandinavia, the culture in