No one knows when the first people lived in Scotland. Evidence exists of settlement further south in Britain dating back half a million years, but the depredations of ice ages and climate change destroyed all trace of occupation in Scotland prior to around 7500 BC. These early Mesolithic people, who may have migrated from the south, and/or via an ancient land bridge from continental Europe, were hunter-gatherers and fishermen, who lived nomadically according to the seasons and availability of foodstuffs. Little remains of their passing, beyond vestiges of temporary homesteads, middens (rubbish dumps - such as the large deposits of sea-shells found at Kirkcudbright, on the south-west coast) and tools of flint and bone, although the latter reveal a high level of skill in working these materials.

Farming began to be adopted around 3500 BCE, gradually triggering and then sustaining an increase in population, as permanent settlements were established from Shetland to the Lowlands. Although dwellings would generally have been made of wood, an outstanding exception is the cluster of stone-built huts, connected by covered alleys, discovered buried in the sand at Skara Brae in Orkney in 1927. Among numerous other important Neolithic sites in Scotland are the chambered tombs at Maeshowe, also in Orkney, one of the most sophisticated prehistoric edifices found anywhere in Europe.

Those other famously cryptic relics of the later Stone Age, stone circles and standing stones – now generally agreed to have been of combined astronomical and religious significance, and a phenomenon peculiar to the British Isles – date from the third millennium BCE, and are again especially numerous in Scotland. Most famous are the concentric rings at Calanais, on the Isle of Lewis, and Orkney’s magnificent Standing Stones of Stenness and Ring of Brodgar Stone Circle, but other circles and individual megaliths are scattered widely throughout the country.

The advent of the Bronze Age, with metalworking technology thought to have been introduced from Ireland, was a gradual process in Scotland. Design similarities in tools, weapons, jewellery and other artefacts from around 1400 BCE onward, however, point to an extensive and highly-developed international trading network by this time, encompassing areas as far apart as Scotland, Scandinavia and Spain.

Aided by these technological improvements, which accelerated markedly from around 1000 BCE with the introduction of iron smelting – especially given Scotland’s rich deposits of ore – agricultural settlement and productivity continued steadily to expand. Other developments from this period include the arrival of the Celts, on their westward progress through Europe, although the extent to which this represented a concerted invasion or colonisation, by any unified tribe or ethnic group, remains hotly disputed. Notable archaeological remains include crannogs, the defensive artificial islands found in many Scottish lochs, numerous hill forts and roundhouses, and the enigmatic circular enclosed structures - unique to Scotland - known as brochs, which are concentrated in the north and west.