A History of Ancient Britain

by Neil Oliver

10,400 years

some of our first Mesolithic ancestors.

Gough’s Cave in nearby Cheddar Gorge,

Cheddar Man

earliest complete human skeleton ever found in Britain.

9,000 years ago, meaning either he or his immediate ancestors were among the very first peo...

A History

of Ancient Britain

that really keeps us apart is the years. Cheddar Man did not live on icy tundra.

His ways were still those of the hunter but his relationship to the land was fundamentally different from that of his Upper Palaeolithic ancestors. During the Mesolithic, people were more settled within defined territories – perhaps being born, living and dying in the same area.

Paler eyes – blue and green – were also better than brown eyes at making the best of low-light conditions.

?

6100

a few thousand

(Ireland

There is no evidence that Palaeolithic hunters ever reached there, before Mesolithic people made their own crossings in boats, around 8000 BC.)

The connection to Europe was severed. The last vestiges of Doggerland were lost beneath

Thousands of years before Britain became an island, farming was enabling people to settle down and build towns and villages in the territories that would one day become the countries of Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Turkey.

Archaeologists have been theorising, for a century at least, about how and why farming came to replace hunting, gathering and fishing.

farmers did not live longer than their hunting

predecessors.

Always moving away from their own waste, as opposed to having it pile up around them, would also have helped keep them well.

The switch to farming has in fact been described as a step backwards for human health.

believe that climate change holds the key. It is thought the end of the last Ice Age was followed, 11,000 or 12,000 years ago, by a ‘climatic optimum’ of good weather that encouraged the growth, in the lands of

more children,

Younger Dryas,

11,000 to 9,500 y...

In short that last cold snap may have left out-of-practice hunters, now handicapped by too-big families, with no option but to learn how to farm for real. Erstwhile Mesolithic people had put all their eggs in one Neolithic basket.

They were trapped in the future.

Neolithic means ‘New Stone Age’ and was at heart a way of life centred on domesticated animals and plants. Like every age before it, the Neolithic is associated with a specific range of tools and equipment, made for different tasks. But more than anyth...

Most archaeologists are at least agreed that farming (together with the rest of the Neolithic toolkit of polished stone axes, knapped stone tools and pottery) was in parts of western Europe by around 5000 BC. And early farming spread because it had to. The first child of a farmer stands to inherit the parent’s land. For second and subsequent children, however, there is often no option but to leave home in search of virgin woodland that can be tamed, cleared and cultivated.

Jared Diamond

alignment of the European continent upon the globe of the Earth that made the spread possible.

Carnac, in Brittany in north-west France.

There has been little proper excavation of the Carnac stones but some of the most recent thinking suggests they were erected not by Neolithic farmers – the people normally associated with great monuments of stone – but by Mesolithic hunters.

The truth is that when it comes to interpretation, the Carnac stones are surrounded by something of a void.

There is little evidence of permanent settlement either, at least in the early centuries, and archaeologists have imagined the farmers being at least partly nomadic, herding their animals from one temporary camp to another. It is also thought that while they deliberately planted stands of wheat and barley, they were unlikely to have stood over them while they grew. Instead they would have concentrated on moving the animals from pasture to pasture, only returning to the crop when it was time for the harvest.

The building of tombs to house the bones of the dead was new behaviour,

the dead validated

their continuing claim on the land.

All across Europe are burial mounds and chambers built by farmers to contain their dead and as time passed the practice became more and more elaborate. Within a few centuries of the building of the Coldrum barrow, farmers in Britain were investing enormous effort and imagination in an attempt to do right by the land and the dead.

West Kennet Long Barrow, in Wiltshire, is one of the most famous Early Neolithic tombs.

Cotswold-Severn group

Wayland’s Smithy (in Oxfordshire),

Hetty Pegler’s Tump and Belas Knap (both in Gloucestershire),

Loire:

The remains of just over 40 people were placed inside West Kennet itself over the course of as little as 25 years,

numerous different sorts of tombs.

They almost always contain just a relatively small number of dead and clearly were not intended as the final resting place for the whole community.

statement of ownership.

Formal burial of individuals seems to have been highly unusual in the Neolithic.