>but has there been a continuous or a discontinuous thread??

That's the tricky bit. For some reason, I find myself wanting it to be the former, but suspecting the latter is more likely, if only due to the vast amount of time that would have passed. It seems so unlikely that a particular 'way of seeing' a landscape could survive as more than a ghostly echo.

But then that's an assumption sort of based on modern perceptions of the differences between folklore and written histories. In the days before writing, more emphasis would have been placed on the reduction of transmission error in oral tradition. I guess it's one of those areas where ethnographic comparison is more relevant than artifact analysis. Creation myths, ancestor worship etc. But that's not saying much really is it? I mean, it's also possible that neolithic setllers could have discovered areas of mesolithic flint scatters and done their own version of what we call archaeology, interpreting the flint scatters through a completlely different perceptual filter to the one we use today. So even if the threads were discontinuous, a sort of 'gaffer-tape and string' continuity could still have been possible. Mebbe.