'Yorkshire born and Yorkshire bred, strong in arm and thick in head' is a phrase sometimes applied to the natives of this county.

But new research shows that at the birth of civilisation, Yorkshiremen were at the top of the development scale when it came to carpentry and animal husbandry. Indeed, while humankind elsewhere was living on berries, men and women in a settlement called Starr Carr ('carr' means boggy ground) near Scarborough were tucking into roast venison and employing sophisticated hunting methods that had not even been introduced in Jericho and the Near East, traditionally supposed to be the most civilised areas of the Stone Age world. Professor Paul Mellars, an archaeologist at Cambridge University's McDonald Institute, said new research showed the Starr Carr people had showed some of the most complicated hunting behaviour in Europe.

Sheffield-born Professor Mellars said: "Yes, it is very satisfying and pleasing to find that early Yorkshireman over 10,000 years ago were doing more impressive things than in other places." In a collaborative project with Tim Schadla-Hall, from the University of London, and the Vale of Pickering Research Trust, research on the settlement, one of a number which surrounded a now disappeared lake, has been in progress since 1985.

They have found that the inhabitants of the settlement split planks from trees to create a jetty into a lake and continually burned fields to encourage new shoot growth and so attract animals.

Today, a very different story of the progress of civilisation is told at the site. A rubbish dump borders it and the soil is only fit to grow potatoes.

Professor Mellars' research will be published later this year.

See COMMENT Ahead of our time

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.