More than 1,200 worked stone tools dating to around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago have been found alongside the River Dee, about 25 kilometres upstream of Aberdeen. Collected by volunteers with a local archaeology group, the artefacts include flint blades, scrapers and waste material, and a broken piece of Neolithic mace head. Features seen in aerial survey maps may represent the remains of a settlement.
     The Mesolithic - or "Middle Stone Age" - sits between the Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) with its chipped stone tools, and the Neolithic (New Stone Age) with its polished stone tools. Among the new types of chipped stone tools associated with the Mesolithic are microliths - very small stone flakes intended for mounting together on a shaft in order to produce a serrated edge. Polished stone was another innovation that arose in some Mesolithic groups.  
     Northern European Mesolithic people flourished at about 6000 BCE, leaving behind woodworking tools, needles and pins, fish-hooks, harpoons and fish spears, larger ground stone tools such as club heads, along with wooden artefacts such as axe handles, dugout boats and paddles, and fishnets made using tree bark fibre. At Star Carr - a Mesolithic site in North Yorkshire - remnants of four or five huts suggest a population of around 25 people, and may have been occupied on a seasonal basis.

Edited from BBC News, Daily Mail Online (8 November 2021)