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Migration of Scots pine to Scotland supported by humans | blogjou

Ben Rawlence

The Treeline

pp. 15-16
08 Nov 2023

Migration of Scots pine to Scotland supported by humans


Before driving north, I read a scientific paper by Lithuanian researchers demonstrating that the DNA of Scots pine in the eastern half of Scotland came from a refugium - a place where species survived the last ice age - near Moscow around 9000-8000 BCE. Previous DNA analysis has shown that the surviving pines in the west of Scotland came from the Iberian peninsula in modern-day Portugal and Spain. In both cases the seed migrated to Scotland on timescales hundreds of times faster than is possible through natural succession. The most likely vehicle for such rapid migration was humans.