Scotland's first settlers arrived about 9000 years ago, once the land was freed from ice and after the climate had warmed. They hunted, fished and gathered from the coasts, rivers, forests and moorlands for roughly four millennia before farming became their way of life. This book discusses the evidence - archaeological, geological and environmental - that exists for this distant period, and uses it to reconstruct the lives of these ancient people: their houses, the tools they used, the clothes they wore and the relationship they had with the environment.