Chapter 2
In This Chapter
● Digging into the prehistoric past
● Understanding the Stone Age and the people who lived then
● Advancing into the Neolithic period
● Beakers, barrows and the Age of Bronze
Imagine a roll of toilet paper laid out on the ground. Pretty long, isn’t it?
That’s the history of planet Earth. Walk along its length, and you find the Jurassic and the Devonian and the Cretaceous periods. You see where the dinosaurs come in and where they go out, and you see volcanoes and sabretoothed tigers and all the rest of that really old prehistoric stuff. What you don’t see are any cavemen in bearskins fighting off dinosaurs: They didn’t come anywhere near living at the same time. In fact you can look as hard as you like, but you won’t find any human life at all, at least not until you’ve got to the very end of the roll. Not to the last few squares, not even to the very last square. See on the edge of the last square? Those perforations? That’s human history on earth. All 800,000 years of it. All the Stone Age stuff and the Middle Ages and your Tudors and Stuarts and Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill and the Cold War - in the history of the world, human history takes up no more space than that.
Now put the toilet roll back before someone misses it and take a sheet of paper. Mark out 100 squares - in a square, in a line, it doesn’t matter. The squares represent human history on earth. Colour the squares in according to the different periods - blue for the Middle Ages, red for the Romans, and so on - and start with the Stone Age. How many squares do you reckon it will need for the Stone Age? Ten? Fifteen? Fifty? Take your coloured pencil and colour in ninety nine squares. And colour a little into the hundredth square as well. The Stone Age dwarfs all other periods of human history. Nothing else in human history lasted so long, and nothing that came later came anywhere near matching this period for the changes and inventions it produced. Come on, these guys deserve some respect. They lasted a long time, and they had a lot to put up with.
What a Load of Rubbish! What Archaeologists Find
Prehistoric people didn’t leave behind any Stone Age manuscripts or tales and legends telling their own story. To piece together what life was like for prehistoric people, archaeologists have to play sleuth.
Going through the trash
What we do have is what they left behind, and you’d be surprised how much archaeologists can work out from it. Nosy journalists know how much you can learn from going through people’s rubbish bins, and archaeologists work on the same principle. Stone Age people (and everyone else after them) left lots of their rubbish behind - literally - and mighty informative all those chicken drumsticks and broken bones are, too.
Archaeologists don’t just look at evidence of prehistoric life. They study all periods right up to the modern day, and the sort of evidence they can provide is still very useful for periods where written history exists. When a new building or road is being constructed, you will often see archaeologists close by, watching the newly-exposed soil for signs of our ancestors.
Examining the toots
Once you start examining the tools, pretty soon you get to thinking about what they used these tools for. A hand-axe means they were cutting things, but what? Wood? Food? An arrow suggests hunting, and hunting suggests a whole set of rituals and roles, so immediately you can begin to build up a picture of the life of a tribe. Animal bones can give a good idea of what they hunted and ate, and sometimes what they did with the bones. Scientists have even been able to get hold of prehistoric seeds and grain, so we know what plants they sowed, and when. Impressive.
As farming took hold, new tasks abounded for everyone: There was seed to be sown, crops to be harvested, harvests to be stored, grain to be ground, food to be baked - and all sorts of tools to be thought of and created. So of course these are the things that archaeologists start finding, and from what they find, experts make deductions about how people were living and how quickly technology was advancing.
Looking at tribal societies of today
In addition to pouring over the detritus of these prehistoric people, sometimes archaeologists have a look at what anthropologists have found studying the social patterns in tribal societies today, so as to get an idea of how Stone Age tribes might have operated. Then there are biologists and palaeo-biologists and geologists and geophysicists until you can hardly move for experts - because we’re not just looking at what the Stone Age people left behind; we’re looking at who and what they were in the first place. And it’s not always easy to be sure.
Uncovering Prehistoric Man
Most people didn’t have any concept of prehistoric man before 1856, when in the Neander Valley in Germany, some quarry workers were out doing whatever quarry workers do when they found a skull and some bones. Not knowing whether they had found animal bones or human bones they took the bones along to their local doctor who had a look at them and said, “Yup” - or more likely, “Ja!” - they were human bones all right.
It's life, Jim, but not as we know it
Then the question became what kind of human bones were they? The skull had no real forehead - the whole thing looked low and long, which is why some people thought it was an ape. It certainly didn’t look like the locals. Could the bones be Asiatic? Cossack troops had been in the area during the Napoleonic Wars; was it one of those? And because the bones were a bit bowlegged, they wondered if the Cossack had had rickets.
Then two prominent British scientists, Charles Lyall and Thomas Huxley, crossed over to Germany to have a look. They decided this chap was definitely human, but a lot older than the Germans realised: This was the skull, they said, of a primitive man.
Why the ruckus?
All this happened in 1856: Victorian times. The idea of a primitive man was dynamite. Many people weren’t even sure what Lyall and Huxley meant. The Bible said that God created Adam: It didn’t say anything about a prototype. But that’s what Huxley and Lyall seemed to be saying this skeleton was.
Darwin
There are fourteen long chapters in Darwin's The Origin ofSpecies. Here is the section on the origins of humankind: "In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." That's it. And that's all of it. But his timing couldn't have been better - he published just as bones began to appear which did indeed throw light on the origin of man.
Three years later Huxley’s friend Charles Darwin published his famous book The Origin of Species. Now, you probably know that Darwin put forward the theory of evolution based on survival of the fittest, and that his ideas have created huge arguments ever since about which is right: the theory of evolution or the Book of Genesis.
What you may not realise is that Darwin’s book is entirely about plants and animals: Except for a brief bit at the end (which you can read in the sidebar “Darwin”), The Origin of Species makes no mention of human beings at all. But that wasn’t going to stop people making a connection between his ideas and these mysterious bones. Things were beginning to evolve.
With Darwin’s book selling like hot cakes it was obvious that people would begin talking about those bones, and they did. They were horrified. The Neander Valley skull (or Neanderthal in German) had a thick ridge over the eyes and the bones were so chunky. Were we really related to that?
The Stone Age
We talk about the Stone Age because people used stones, but you would be surprised how many different ways there are of using stones. A smooth, round stone? It might look at home on a beach, but had you ever thought of it as a hammer? If you look carefully at some of the ones that have turned up at Stone Age sites you can see that they still carry all the little marks and chips from hammering other stones into place.
Then there are sharp tools. If you were stuck in the wilds without a blade of any sort, would you know which sort of stone to pick up and how to break it so you got a sharp cutting edge? Even if you did, you’d probably end up with something pretty crude: just a large pebble broken in two. Congratulations. You’ve reached the technological level of some of the earliest hominids!
Stone Age people were a lot more skilled than that. They crafted and shaped their tools, and some of those flint knives cut like a razor. They made tools out of bones too. Through their cave paintings, we can really get a clue on what was going on inside all those skulls that keep cropping up. Here’s what we can tell:
● They knew they needed tools for some jobs, and we can see those jobs growing in sophistication.
● They could identify the best materials. Picking the best materials probably started as trial-and-error, but this knowledge got passed down through the generations. That suggests skill and education.
● They were highly skilled and imaginative. Every tool they made had to be invented first.
Hey, hey - We're the monkeys! The Neanderthals
Thanks to Darwin and his The Origin of Species, published in 1859, you could hardly walk along a cliff in the nineteenth century without tripping over a fossil hunter, with a hammer in one hand and a copy of The Origin of Species in the other. Soon these people began to find more bones and skulls just like the German ones. There were bits and pieces of Neanderthal in Belgium, in France, in Spain, and in Greece. Bits started turning up outside Europe, in the Middle East, and in central Asia. But it was always bits: a skull here, a thigh bone there - that was him all over. Then, in 1908, they finally unearthed a whole Neanderthal skeleton in France. At last they could work out what these strange people really looked like. It was Bad News.
This French Neanderthal had big bones, bent legs, a bent neck, stiff joints - it looked more like a lumbering ape than anything human. So people thought that’s what Neanderthals were: great big apes, with ugly faces and knuckles dragging along the floor. And dim. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? Big ape-like thing living in caves going “Ug ug” and wearing animal skins. Yes, people told themselves, whatever else we thought about these Neanderthals, we had to be better than them. And if we did evolve from them, well didn’t it make sense that we would be cleverer? Think again, friend.
Scientists have done a lot more work on these Neanderthals, and we have got them so badly wrong that they should get a good lawyer and sue. And if they had lived a bit longer they might have done it, too.
Here are some facts:
● That skeleton they found in 1908 came from an elderly Neanderthal with chronic arthritis. Other skeletons - and we’ve found lots of them by now - don’t show any of the same deformities. Allowing for a slightly squashed face and a slightly heavier bone structure, you wouldn’t look twice at these guys if you passed them in the street.
● Neanderthals were not stupid. In fact, their brains were bigger than ours. They were highly advanced tool makers, they were organised enough to hunt even the biggest animals around, and from the way they buried their dead they seemed to have had some sense of spirituality and religion.
● No-one alive today is descended from Neanderthals. Not even England football supporters.
We simply don’t know what happened to the Neanderthals. We know they survived the Ice Age, and it may be that the shape of their skulls and faces helped. Scientists have made comparisons with the Inuit in the Arctic. Looking at some of the breaks and twists in their bones we think they must have had an incredibly high pain threshold. But for some reason, they died out. And they didn’t give birth to us lot, either. Because one of the biggest mysteries about the Neanderthals is that we have found definite human bones from the same time. In other words, at one time there were two human races walking the earth (since the Neanderthals died out, you could say it makes them our first cousins once removed).
Meet your ancestors
Modern humans, what scientists call Homo sapiens sapiens, first appeared in the Middle East, possibly at about the same time that the Neanderthals first appeared in Europe. It took a long time, but eventually this new type of people began appearing in Europe too.
The Swanscombe woman
The oldest identifiably human remains in Europe come from England. It’s a female skull which turned up at Swanscombe in Kent. But what was she? She looks a bit like a really early type of human called Homo erectus. Homo because we are definitely talking humans, not apes here; erectus because these people walked upright - no stooping. But she’s not entirely like other Homo erectus finds: her big, round brain section is more Neanderthal. Maybe Swanscombe woman was Homo erectus’s swan song.
Ice Age
The Ice Age was long, about 990,000 years, long enough to go from Swanscombe woman, part Homo erectus and part Homo sapiens, through the Neanderthal story, and on to Homo sapiens sapiens. That's us.
Don't get the wrong idea about the Ice Age. It didn't mean the whole world was covered in ice the whole time. It didn't even mean it was cold the whole time. We reckon they probably had some quite hot summers in the Ice Age. But the winters were very long and very cold, and the earth's temperature was definitely falling. It was certainly cold enough for people to make their homes in caves and to wrap themselves up in animal skins. They would have had to hunt, and in those days there were plenty of woolly mammoths walking around well wrapped up against the cold. There's lots of meat on a woolly mammoth, but how would you feel about facing it armed only with a few spears tipped with flint? It took guts.
Paint Your Cro-Magnon
Some of the people worrying woolly mammoths were our friends the Neanderthals, but by the time of the last Ice Age there were some new kids on the block. Rounder heads but sharper brains. We call them Cro-Magnon, after the place in France where we found something very special they left behind. These guys could paint. These are the people who created those amazing paintings in the caves at Lascaux in France. Painting doesn’t just take skill or brains: It takes imagination and artistic sensitivity. Perhaps we’re looking at the first artistic tantrums in history. Tools and arrows and hunting parties are all very practical: What exactly was the point of cave painting? We don’t know exactly, and we probably never will.
The paintings may have had some ritual or religious purpose, or they may have been the Cro-Magnon equivalent of holiday snaps - “Here’s one of me with a bison” and “That’s Sheila and the kids when we walked over to France for the summer”. But with Cro-Magnon, we can be pretty sure that we are looking in the mirror and seeing ourselves. Literally. They did a DNA test on some Middle Stone Age bones in the South West of England and found an exact match with a local history teacher. His pupils probably weren’t surprised, but think this one through: Despite all those waves of Celts and Romans and Saxons and Normans (which you can read about in Chapters 3-7), some people never moved from where their ancestors lived. Our gene pool goes back all the way to the Stone Age. Perhaps the teacher even lived in the same house.
Who says No Man is an Island?
Although we've been talking about "Britain" the term doesn't really make much sense for the prehistoric period for the simple reason that "Britain" and "Ireland", as separate islands off the European mainland, didn't actually exist. They were simply outlying parts of the whole European continent, and they stayed that way until the end of the Ice Age. When the great thaw came, round about 7,500 BC, the water levels rose dramatically, creating what we call the English Channel and the Irish Sea. It must have taken the Neolithics by surprise: they were islanders now and they were going to have to get used to it.
Cro-Magnon Man had culture. Archaeologists have found needles and pins, which suggests they had worked out how to make proper clothes out of all those animal skins. Other things that have been found include fish hooks and harpoons, which means they went fishing (which could account for all that imagination). They even had jewellery. But they were a nomadic people, regularly upping sticks and following the deer. Hunter-gatherers. But all that was about to change. They didn’t know it, but their world was about to get turned upside down.
Plough the Fields, Don’t Scatter - the Neolithic Revolution
As far as we know, the first people to work out that you could get food by sowing seeds and waiting for them to grow came from the “fertile crescent” in the Middle East. The idea really caught on, and when it spread to Europe, it created what historians call the neolithic revolution. (Neo=new; lith=stone, so neolithic=New Stone Age). Okay, so it didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t necessarily make life easier: Farming is a lot more work than hunting.
People may have taken up farming because they probably needed extra food to feed an increasing population. Whatever the reason, farming changed everything. Hunters blend into the landscape, but farmers change it. People stopped following wherever the deer went; instead, they settled down and learned to plough. You can date big human impact on the environment to the New Stone Age.
As farming took hold, new tasks abounded for everyone: There was seed to be sown, crops to be harvested, harvests to be stored, grain to be ground, food to be baked - and all sorts of tools to be thought of and created. So of course these are the things that archaeologists start finding.
The innovation didn’t stop with farming. Neolithic people learned how to tame pigs, horses, cattle and how to use them for work or for food. They already knew about skinning animals, but somewhere along the line, they met sheep and figured out how to get textiles without killing the beast who provided it. Exactly how these people worked out that you can shear a sheep, play about with the wool, and tease it into a long thread to be used in making cloth no-one really knows (it’s not, you must admit, the most obvious use of a sheep).
Maybe they got the idea or learned the technique from trading contacts. During the Neolithic period, there were fully-fledged cities with walls and streets and a crime problem at Jericho and Catal Huyuk in Turkey.
And then there’s religion. If you’re hunting, you invoke the spirit of the deer or wild boar. When you take up farming, however, you’re putting your life entirely in the hands of the sun, the rain, the earth, and the British weather. No wonder these things began to get worshipped as gods. The British weather still is.
What survives from the Neolithic period is amazing:
● In southern England, a wooden track which led over marshland was found; it may have been one of many. That’s a prehistoric road network!
● At Star Carr in Yorkshire, antlers and bones and tools, including a wooden paddle (which seems to indicate that these people worked out some kind of boats) were found. Star Carr goes back to 7,500 BC, which is almost twice as old as the little commune settlement of seven huts which has survived at Skara Brae on Orkney.
● At Skara Brae, beautifully crafted jewellery and pottery have been found. These were highly resourceful and sophisticated people.
● Burial chambers under long grassy mounds called long barrows have been discovered, and let’s not forget Stonehenge, the Neolithic equivalent of a massive public works project.
Rotting stones: A national institution
Stonehenge. Neolithic people built it, and the Beakers (explained in the section “Beakermania”) helped complete it. Stonehenge was huge. If it looks impressive now, think how it must have looked when it was new. It’s a massive circle of upright stones supporting lintels, with another horseshoe-shape set of stones inside it, and an altar stone inside that. It’s aligned with the sunrise at the summer solstice and the sunset at the winter solstice, so it seems a pretty safe bet that Stonehenge was a religious or ritual centre of some sort. If size and scale are anything to go by, we are looking at a place of national importance.
The stones aren’t local; they were probably brought all the way from Wales. For a long time archaeologists assumed it must have been done by hauling on log rollers. Now they think they were brought most of the way by boat, but even then, Salisbury Plain, where Stonehenge is located, is a long way from the sea. The effort, the organisation, and the sheer number of people required to pull off such a massive undertaking were enormous. We’re not just talking a few druids cutting mistletoe: Stonehenge meant meticulous planning, technical know-how, communication, logistics, and some very good rope-making. Not to mention how you persuade all those people to do the dragging.
And Stonehenge isn’t the only circular formation of importance. There’s Woodhenge, not far from Stonehenge (but made of, er, wood) and even a wooden henge on the coast known as Seahenge. Then there’s Tara in Ireland, where the Kings would be crowned in due course. There are simple circles, like Castlerigg in Cumbria, and big, complex circles, like Avebury, which has two sets of concentric circles inside the bigger one and a ditch around the whole thing. These stones tell us a lot about the Beakers and the Neolithics, but of course they don’t tell us the one thing we’re dying to know: What did they build them for?
Giving It Some Heavy Metal: The Bronze Age
Someone, probably in the Middle East, found out one day that if you leave some types of shiny rock in the fire, the shiny stuff melts and then sets hard again when it cools. And then some bright spark realised that with a bit of ingenuity, you could set the material in particular shapes. Like ploughs. Or swords or spearheads. Welcome to the age of metal.
And the bronze goes to...
We used to think that metal first came to Britain through invasion. The British are so used to the idea of “waves” of invaders, that it seemed only natural to assume that the first bronze age people came leaping out of landing craft, kicking neolithic ass. Well no, no evidence supports that theory, and anyway, why should anyone want to? Much better to do what probably happened: Take this new technique to the big island over the sea and make your fortune. Especially as Britain had some very useful deposits of copper and tin. And that’s what seems to have happened. New people began to drift in from the continent bringing this interesting technique with them, starting in Cornwall, where the metals were, and spreading out from there.
Puzzles and mysteries no-one's answered - yet
We simply don't why the Neolithics and Beakers built Stonehenge, and short of finding the makers' instructions one day, we are not likely to know either. But this is one of many things we don't know about these people. We know they had a language, but we don't know what it was; we know they made music, but we don't know what it sounded like; we don't know who their leaders were or whether they enjoyed the sun or if they ever got tired of eating deer.
People who don't like unsolved mysteries come up with their own ideas, no matter how wacky. Some people suggest, for example, that
Stonehenge was a clock or a computer or the launch pad for a space ship. And modern-day Druids carry out not-very-ancient ceremonies at Stonehenge every summer solstice, and hikers follow imaginary "ley lines" between ancient sites of completely different periods. Well, it's a free country. But if you really want to know what ancient Britain looked like, stick to the evidence with a little leeway for imagination. Leave the spaceships to the loonies.
What should we call these newcomers? You might think they’d be called the Metalworkers or something suitable like that, but no. You see, when they weren’t busy making metal they enjoyed a drink, and we know this was pretty important for them because they put their very distinctive beaker-like beer cups in their graves. So archaeologists called them the Beaker People. A bit like classifying us as the Tupperware Folk.
Beakermania
The Neolithic people may have started making things in metal even before the Beaker People began to arrive - we’re pretty sure they had in Ireland - but the Beakers were able to take the process an important step further. At this stage, everyone who worked with metal was using copper, which looks nice but isn’t very strong. But the Beakers knew how to mix copper with tin - Britain had lots of both - to make bronze. Now, OK, Britain and the Beaker people were not at the, er, cutting edge of metal technology. That was the Minoan civilization which was under way in Greece. But it was the Beakers who brought Neolithic Britain gently into the early Bronze Age, and Britain never looked back.
Wheels and barrows
We don't know who exactly invented the wheel, but it was someone in Ancient Sumer (modern-day Iraq). The wheel was without question the greatest invention in the history of the world. (Heaven help us if it ever turns out the Sumerians took out a patent). We're pretty certain the Neolithics didn't have wheels, but they certainly came in during the Bronze Age. Wheels made all the difference. They made travel easier, they made transporting heavy goods easier, and they even made ploughing easier.
The Beakers seem to have had a thing about circles. It's a mystical shape, of course: no corners, just a line forming a perfect O. The Neolithics had buried their chiefs under great long mounds known as barrows. The Beakers went for round barrows. There were different types. You could have a simple bowl barrow, very popular and seen everywhere, or else a bell barrow, which had an extra mound for protection. Then there was the flatter, more complex disc barrow, the low-lying saucer barrow and the communal chuck-in-your-dead pond barrow, which was just a large dip where you could dump your aunt.
We’re pretty sure that the Beakers and the Neolithic people got on. All the signs are that the Beakers shared their technology and even helped to do up Stonehenge in the latest fashion. Like the Neolithics, the Beakers were hunters to start with, but settled down to farming in time. Archaeologists have found what look like the foundations of cattle enclosures, though they might have been the Beakers’ huts. Caves were, like, so last era. Now they were building proper round huts, with wooden fences around them for protection, sometimes grouped together in little hill-top forts.
With bronze pins and needles you could make finer clothes, and with bronze shears you could cut them to a better fit. A bronze plough cuts better and straighter than a bone one, and a bronze sickle harvests more easily. You could have really fancy brooches and highly decorated daggers and belt buckles. We know they did, because these artefacts have been found in burial sites in the West Country. And then there were the famous beakers themselves: ornate drinking cups made on a potter’s wheel.
You did get that, didn’t you? A potter’s wheel. Because at some point in the Bronze Age, someone invented the wheel. It was a revolution.