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[Music] the story of how modern Britain was created isn't just about kings queens and politicians it's about how we learned to farm to trade and to live together it's about how War New Gods and new learning shaped life on these
Bettany Hughes traces Britain's Stone Age: rising seas cut the island off, hunter-gatherers adapt to forests, and early farmers and monument-builders reshape the land.
Key Takeaways
- Britain's island status and landscape were shaped by climate change at the end of the Ice Age.
- Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were intelligent, adaptable people whose way of life was challenged by forest expansion.
- The shift to farming and permanent settlements transformed both society and the physical landscape.
- Archaeology, from middens to footprints to DNA, allows us to reconstruct everyday lives of prehistoric Britons.
What the video covers
- Britain became an island around 6,000 BC as global warming melted the ice sheets and rising seas submerged the land bridge to continental Europe.
- The first inhabitants were hunter-gatherers who moved seasonally, stored food, and had no permanent settlements, pottery, or farming.
- Expanding forests (oak, birch, hazel) overran open hunting grounds, forcing people to adapt and roughly halving the population.
- Coastal sites like Oronsay show hunter-gatherer families returning to the same camps, leaving middens of shells, fishbones and burnt hazelnuts.
- Archaeologists reconstruct Mesolithic bender huts from postholes, showing communities of around 20-25 people.
- Experimental archaeology, such as flint-tool making and bow replication, illustrates the skills and knowledge these people had.
- Footprints preserved on the coast give glimpses of everyday life, including running speed and the presence of children.
- Genetic evidence indicates that many British ancestors had Middle Eastern origins, showing ancient migration patterns.
- The Neolithic brought farming, permanent houses, and a business-like relationship with the land, with Scara Brae providing a well-preserved example.
- Monuments such as Flint mines and stone circles reveal growing populations, emerging social hierarchies, and symbolic and ritual life.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: The First Age of Britain
- 02:13Britain Becomes an Island
- 03:53Hunter-Gatherers and the Expanding Forest
- 06:26Life in a Mesolithic Bender Hut
- 12:00Footprints, Bows and Hunting Skills
- 18:00Ancestry, Migration and Early Farming
- 30:00The Neolithic Revolution and Scara Brae
- 38:20Monuments, Flint Mines and Stone Circles
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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islands using Clues from the everyday lives of men and women this series tells the story of how Britain and its people have been transformed from the Stone Age to the Industrial Revolution [Music] this is the story of the first age of
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Britain it tells of a struggle between man and the [Music] environment it begins in 6,000 BC with a few people learning to survive on the edges of hostile forests it ends 4,000 years later with them dominating the landscape with
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monuments that stand to this day [Music] I the island of Britain exists because of global warming about 10,000 years ago the ice sheets that covered most of the northern hemisphere began to [Music] melt temperatures were going up sea were
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Rising Britain was still a peninsula joined to the European landmass but that was about to change forever every year the land bridges that connected us to Continental Europe grew narrower mile after mile of hunting grounds were submerged and then around
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6,000 BC the last finger of land that joined us to northern France disappeared underwater planet Earth had a new island and for the people caught on it the first age of Britain had [Music] begun for modern Britains the Stone Age
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people who lived here 8,000 years ago can seem remote and unknowable it's easy to imagine they're Nothing Like Us but strip away our clothes and technology and we are identical they went and sort of people going ug ug and walking around and and
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hairy they were highly intelligent everything that if if you put them here today they might find things a bit different but they would have our brain capacity our ability to reason our ability to talk our ability to communicate so they're not different in
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any way at all they're us the people who lived here 8,000 years ago were hunter gatherers they moved according to the seasons hoarding stores of fur game and nuts at base camps tapping Delicacies like Birch syrup straight from
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trees they didn't have permanent settlements they didn't cultivate crops they didn't farm animals they hadn't yet worked out how to make pots it was a way of life that had been very successful but now it was under threat the global warming that had
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created the island of Britain was having a dramatic effect on their environment for ,000 years the people in northern Europe were used to living in Wide Open Spaces then around the time that Britain became an island their habitat completely changed now what they
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had to deal with was dense impenetrable Forest Oak Birch and Hazel took a thousand years to cover the country but an individual hunter gatherer would have seen his local hunting grounds overrun in a few short years people are having to deal with this
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change and this is a very new thing this won't have happened before I mean we we don't know how they reacted to Woodland psychologically but they would have been probably quite scary [Music] places you could wander around in a
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piece of Woodland like this and be lost in minutes there there are no points in the landscape to give you any idea where you are it is almost impossible you're Tangled in the barb wire almost of the of the undergrowth it's it's nasty and I
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think that's what makes it hostile to people as the trees spread the archaeological evidence suggests the human population halved something in the alien world of the forest whether it was new diseases or new challenges was killing people off there's not a lot of food in a wood
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other than the animals themselves and it's very difficult to see those animals so if you're going to go hunting you'll go hunting in those areas where you've got a relatively good view of what it is you're trying to catch so
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this isn't the place to do it so to make a success of their world hunter gatherers left for the far fringes of the country this is the tiny island of or off the west coast of Scotland coastal areas are relatively
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open and the Sea a rich source of food hunter gatherer family groups of around 20 came here in simple boats every year at designated [Music] times dotted around the island just below the surface archaeologists found thousands of burnt hazelnut shells and
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Telltale Scorch marks the traces of prehistoric campfires all in the shadow of these Strang looking hillocks hunter gatherers were very particular about where they put their rubbish because groups kept on coming back to the same spot year in year out
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this miden that I'm standing on is the result in effect it's a giant Rubbish Tip packed with stone AG waste everything would have gone in here when it was excavated what was left were mainly limp pit shells and Fishbones
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that had clearly been eaten but there were two human teeth and even the remains of a human [Music] hand humans were clinging precariously to Britain around 8,000 years ago archaeologists call this era the misthic or Middle Stone Age there's evidence for about 1500
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campsites across the whole country from this time and our best guess is that the population numbered a few hundred thousand but somehow people survived they might not have lived in the woods but they quickly learned how to exploit
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them in fact this would be better described as the wood rather than the Stone Age but wooden artifacts aren't as tenacious as their Stone counterparts well really I think the thing near Lewis in East Sussex archaeologists are trying
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to rebuild a hunter gatherer home it's based on one that existed 9,000 years ago in Northern irland the original structure is longone but the rotting wood did leave Clues as to how it was built so obviously the outer cover isn't
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going to survive or leave any real record right but these posts which are radiating around in a nice Circle being driven down probably about that far below ground level and that will rot away and you'll actually have a darker
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colored soil filling in where it's gone into the ground and from that we can see the depth we can see the width and also as importantly we can see that they were angled telling us that the building came
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in rather than having a sort of straight sides or whatever the building actually comes in together this Hut is known as a bender dwelling because the frame is made of flexible Hazel saplings that have been bent into a dome we can't be
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sure what the walls were filled in with but it's likely that something plentiful and insulating like Heather was used chances are you've got two or three buildings around as well so it's not the only building maybe up to 20 to 25
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people is a sort of minimum number to make a community work and how many people would have lived in here when it was first buil one of these five or six people in here okay can fit in very
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snugly maybe even more yeah going in helped me imagine the intimate and organized world of the hunter gatherers if you're in this building there's an awful lot of chemistry in Magic just in the light yes yeah um when you go into a
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modern room and you turn on a switch and what have you got you've got the whole room flood with light we take for granted and it doesn't there's no chemistry to it there's no magic to it tell thing I'm very surprised by is this
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kind of Fire Guard around the half that wasn't doesn't feel very misthic but obviously it is it it's there in the record there are holes around the half number of possibilities spring to mind one is it's a very good fire guard and
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if you're a hunter gatherer Community ensuring that your your little people grow up to be big hunter gatherers and support you in in in your Elder years is very important so keeping them out of the fire and it does that very
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well archaeologists used original tools like this 8,000 year old Flint ax head in the Hut's construction Flint is extremely common in Southern England and careful working can produce an edge that's as sharp as any modern-day surgical blade is that what you were aiming for
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that that's exactly what I was aiming for this beautiful long very sharp yes blade came off it's amazingly sharp isn't it extremely sharp individuals amassed their own collections of painstakingly produced Precision Tools this period they're also making tiny
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little things these are called microliths they're pieces of Flint that have been struck off extremely carefully it's a very very controlled process sometimes you'll find little faults or flaws or you'll see where they make made a mistake um so it's a very exciting way
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of really engaging with that individual from let you say 8,000 years ago Tiny Stone blades like these were turned into arrow heads Harpoon points and knives so with a Long Blade you can do something like this this is a knife beautifully
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Long Blade but we can protect it and secure it by putting in a mixture of beeswax and pine resin very sticky very strong and this is our sort of prehistoric glue Britain's hunter gatherers were learning to adapt to the forest and it was
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bringing out their inventiveness in the misthic we see the first appearance of a weapon so deadly that it would reign supreme for nearly 8,000 years the bow and arrow the bow was invented probably to bring down smaller quicker animals in a forest situation
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it's very difficult to throw a spear when you're surrounded by dense Underground growth I think it's a lot easier to use a bow and you've got accuracy and speed of the arrow but also you've got the option of hiding up trees
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and taking out your prey from there I think be quite difficult to throw a spear from a tree without falling at yourself a precious tiny number of Stone Age bows have survived and Stuart prior has copied one that was found preserved
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in a bog in Denmark and this is a replica that you've made this is this is about 7,000 BC and this is called a self bow it's made from a single piece of wood and it's yes an incredibly uh developed
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weapon this is a uh uh this is a bow from about 3,000 BC um an actual fact interestingly enough the technology involved in this bow isn't as good as the earlier 7000 BC weapon yeah so it's almost like the technolog is going
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backwards because the people that were using this one were farmers so because these people relied on hunting for their livelihood obviously the technology needed to be that much you know that much better the med long bow is much
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fatter than the hunter gatherer bow this means it's easy to mass-produce the flat Hunter gather bow takes hours of careful crafting but it's lighter easier to carry and more powerful their arrowheads were tiny Flint microliths often there was an extra Barb
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making this a truly nasty and effective weapon we compared the power of the bows by using them to fire arrows into a dead pig a similar Target to the wild boar that were hunted in the Stone Age the medieval bow was
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ineffective the second attempt was no better the hunter gatherer bow was Lethal yes [Music] hunter gatherers must have passed on information and stories about their world there would have been myths and memories but also oral knowledge essential for the Next Generation
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survival at this time our most common foods like potatoes wheat and rice were unknown and Tiny burnt fragments around hards show that people were experimenting with other ways of getting essential nutrients these customers which may not look very appetizing now these are one
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of our most important sources of of starch these are the ryom or the bits that go underground from the bull Rush from from the Reed mace and if you have a look in the heart of it can you see
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it's nice and soft and white that's almost pure starch very very important food source now you can eat it straight off it's much much better when it's being cooked put it in the fire 15 20 minutes and stone AG equivalent of
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marshmallows they're tasty better come out better than they look now yeah they don't look appe they don't nor do they feel appetizing they feel disgusting you'll be surprised you'll be converted yeah let's peel it open and see have a have a
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smell yeah it's good actually it's okay isn't it yeah so what you do with this is to pull out these fibers and have a chew on them you'll find pretty tasty in fact you're sucking the the starch off them
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now they're quite stringy you can feel the sort of thick glutenous nature of the starch I feel like that's doing me good rather than giving me a fabulous taste sensation it's a very plain taste but very very important starch if you think of the
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environments that Mesolithic people are living in there's absolutely tons of this stuff so you you're never going to be short of this starch staple the teeth that were found from this period in the mid in Scotland have no cavities
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but they are worn down this implies that people did chew on tough foods like romes there's no doubt that experimental archaeology brings us closer to Stone Age life but it's incredibly frustrating what huge gaps in our knowledge we still
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have I can hold this axe which is 8,000 years old and yet I have no idea at all what it was called back then we don't know what language was spoken and the names that men and women had for each
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other and for the things in the world around them we don't even know what their skin color was in fact one of the only representations of the human form from the first age of Britain is this 4,000-year-old wooden Idol found in a
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bog in Essex possibly left there as a gift to a long forgotten God the spiritual landscape of Stone Age Britain is murky to say the least but there are tantalizing Clues buried under these fields in the veil of Pickering in North Yorkshire is
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persuasive evidence of ritual on the island of Britain the valley was once a lake and the surrounding area supported around 500 people a large group by misthic [Music] standards archaeologists found hundreds of shale beads by the Lake's Edge
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whether they're religious objects or just adornments we can't say but they do evidence a world where life was by no means just about survival one of the most significant discoveries in the veil was a deer skull with antlers still attached the skull
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bone had been tampered with pierced so it could be worn as a mask some people say they were worn on the head so you can go hunting Red Deer well anybody who hunts Red Deer today will say if you're going to try and get
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near a red deer the last thing you want to do is carry this great big headdress on your head with an sticking out so I incline to the view that in fact those antler frontlets are worn here for some
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form of ritual activity associated with hunting and not to do with actually going out in hunting in most early societies there is no distinction between the physical and the mystical these Landscapes would have been rustling with spirits and
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inexplicable Powers but this didn't stop men trying to play God themselves the lake at the veil of Pickering might be long gone but we know from fossilized pollen that the banks were ringed with dense reads and in their day they must
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have been almost exactly like these ones at nearby hornsey Mir the fossilized Reed pollen was found together with tiny fragments of charcoal and that tells us something significant about the men and women who lived there over 9,000 years
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ago they weren't content just to be passive scers who Eed out an existence on the edge of the Jungle they wanted to control their environment at the end of the Ice Age this whole area was covered with dense vegetation and they resolved
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to clear it with one of the few resources available to them fire it appears that burning is taking place at regular intervals burning of the Reed swamp because if you burn the Reed off it then grows young choots
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which are ideal for grazing so look looks as if what they're probably doing is they're encouraging animals down to the water's edge by removing the Reed giving young shoots and then they're probably hiding in the Reed and shooting
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animals from there all the indications therefore are that it's right at the beginning of the misthic that man is already manipulating his immediate environmental area despite Clues like burnt pollen animal remains and discarded tools there are no complete skelet from the
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misthic and so it's hard to step across the Millennia and engage with individual human characters but thanks to a freak of geology on a beach near Liverpool we can get amazingly close to real Stone Age people here we can quite literally see
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the footsteps of the past oh look at it emerging that's fantastic while we filmed the tide revealed the footprint of a stone AG man I can't quite believe it actually that that footprint is a misthic come together uh yes it looks like it was
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made yesterday but this imprint was made by a man who ran along this beach 5,000 years ago if we look carefully you'll see that the heel impression is shallower than the toes and that suggests that well you can imagine
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yourself you are running and so as you run the front part of your foot is deeper than the heel we know these Footprints really are 5 to 6,000 years old thanks to a technique called quartz luminescence dating they've survived because 5,000
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years ago this area was a long stretch of mud flats a stone AG Brit ran along here on a hot day and the sun baked his footprint in the mud then the tides dumped layer after layer of mud over the dried print
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sealing it for posterity and eventually the process began to reverse as the sea levels Rose the tides Stripped Away the layers of mud finally revealing these ancient Footprints because they're not fossils just imprints in the mud they only last
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for a few short hours before they're washed away forever the human footprint represents on average 50% of a person's height and so we looking at a footprint 26 CM which indicates someone who was probably 5' 6 7 in other words he's about as tall as I
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am just beginning to see here the outline of the toes that is incredible cuz look those are his those are the tow prints yes and he has long toenails because if you think of it Stone Age man didn't have nice neat
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uh nailed Clippers now we see from the position of the big toe that this is a left foot and the next visible impression over there is also a left foot question is where is the right foot indeed this is a later
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deposition of sediment but if you look there you can see the impression of the right foot which hasn't yet fully eroded out of the sediment I get a thrill every time actually when I come out and see a trail
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like this and put my hand into a footprint and reach out into the past it's amazing isn't it cuz they last for five or 6 thousand years and then and then they're gone and then they're gone overnight despite their brief
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reappearance a few Footprints can give us a real glimpse into Everyday Life by measuring the pace in the stride it's also possible to cat a at the speed at which a person was running oh so and again he was running he was running at
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about 5 km an hour three 3 m hour across the then soft mud I wonder why he's running along this stretch if we look here in the same stratum you can see the impression made by Red Deer so he might have been hering
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it he might well have been Hing it or hunting or hunting because here a skinning Road Deer the tail end of the heel has made scratch marks and then he's gun in like that and then he's pushed in with the front part of the
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Clover hoof and then he that is an incredible thought isn't it that this women and children's footprints also appear but few indicate running it seems they came to the beach for a different reason there is a strong suggestion in
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fact that the the women and children were involved in gathering shell food or perhaps looking for eggs in the in the reads but perhaps Gordon's most Charming discovery shows how little Human Nature has changed over the Millennia there was
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one might almost say the the conventional trail of uh female walking along collecting Seafood but then the close by there was a confusion of children's footprints they were everywhere higgledy piggledy as if while Mom was working the children were
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mudding lcking one hot summer day 5,000 years [Music] ago the hunter gather a way of life that had held sway for thousands of years was about to be eradicated despite being an island Britain has never developed in isolation even in the Stone Age the
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channel was more more Highway than barrier 5 and a half thousand year old axes made of exotic French Stone have been found in Southern England evidence that we were part of a complex exchange network but it wasn't just novelty Goods
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arriving here wooden rowing boats packed with immigrants were also turning up these immigrants brought with them new languages new technologies new ways of living but possibly the most revolutionary Innovation was Farming Farming started in the Middle East around 10,000 years ago and it was
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physically brought inch by inch across the Northern Hemisphere until it ended up on these Shores around 3,500 BC now our evidence for that being a shift not just of ideas but of people themselves comes from our genes if you
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were to analyze the DNA of any modern native Brit you'd find that between 20 and 40 % of his genetic material was of Middle Eastern origin in other words a substantial number of our ancestors come from Modern Day Syria Israel the Lebanon
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and [Music] Iraq it's impossible to say whether the hunter gatherers were forced to make way for the farmers or whether they were seduced by a new relationship with the land that allowed them to settle down what's certain is that farming
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found a staunch Ally in the British landscape this is one of the most hospitable places on Earth the land is fertile and relatively easy to cultivate there's a network of waterways that allows for good communication and the light constant drizzle is actually
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perfect for agriculture implements like this primitive plow represent one of the most dramatic demanding changes of Lifestyle to have ever taken place on these ises with the aid of tools such as this Flint edged sickle Britain's first farmers introduced the crops wheat and
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barley they established herds of foreign animals like cows and sheep but most importantly unlike hunter gatherers who moved between temporary camps Farmers settled down but they faced a serious obstacle to farm they needed open land the trees that had dominated the
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country for the last 5,000 years had to come down it was a Herculean task it's estimated that it took five generations of one family an entire Century to clear just half a square mile of Woodland archaeologists call the first
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age of farming the Neolithic on land clawed back from the forests people built Britain's first permanent homes we'd have little idea what these were like had it not been for a stroke of luck in the 1920s a freak storm struck the
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main island of orne and uncovered something quite miraculous the Gale blew away the sandunes to reveal the homes of a stone age farming Community who lived here 5,000 years ago this is absolutely staggering so this is one home here this is one what
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we assume family unit they're quite big I mean when you stand up here and look down they don't look that big but when you measure them up you know they're sort of 60 70% of the floor area of a
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modern two-bedroom semi except they're all in one room now known as Scara Bray The Village consists of seven identical houses linked by corridors it occupies an area less than half the size of a football field the walls and Furniture Are Made
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of Stone only the roofs which were probably thatched are missing nosing around someone's house tells you a lot about family Dynamics and Scara BR is no exception as you come in there are two main beds and the bed on the right is always
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bigger than the bed on the left that one's quite small though I mean you'd never be able to stretch out no no they're not very big is that a male female division well that's the best explanation that's been offered in
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the sense of you know in the same you see the same pattern in places like The Western Isles in the P where the men's bed was always on the right and bigger and the women's bed was always on the
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left and smaller the beds had canopies over them yeah these pillars in front carrying well I presume skin canopies like a four poster bed yeah just drap to keep the draft out and possibly drips off you because if you imagine that the roof is
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not absolutely watertight under all circumstances it would be rather nice to have something over you and not have sort dripping it on your head or whatever yeah yeah all the buildings are dug into one man-made Mound we can go through here yeah we can
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get it oh you really have to case of right hand yeah absolutely the houses are connected by passageways they were once covered by stones but these fell down long ago they're very carefully designed so they throw the wind away
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from the entrances so as you come to the entrance into a house the curve of the passage has thrown the wind yes away from the doorway yeah now this is very protective let's go through serious crawling yeah as you crawl in you get
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the impression that the inhabitants were house proud people who wanted to impress their guests you see how the dresser dominates your your view of you know that's what you see of the house mainly oh you can that's all that you noticed yeah a
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dresser seems a very modern phrase why do you know it's that well they're storage units which occur in all the houses and you know there's no reason why people in the past didn't need storage just like us yeah and so they're
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dresses and that's where you put your best China just like we do you know that's where so to speak you express your wealth and your status the house is full of items from everyday life this grinding stone was
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found full of crushed up Fishbones which would have been used as winter cattle feed in the center of every house is an enormous Heth where a fire would have burned day and night just like modern homes there are shelves
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above the beds exquisitely worked bone beads were found on them whoever carved these mysterious Stone bubles was clearly reaching for some kind of geometric Perfection all these pieces suggest people had time for complex analytical thought and ideas of beauty
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when you come somewhere like this you're stepping into someone's house and you can even step into someone's bed when this place was excavated it was full of beads and pendants and because this is the female side of the house immediately
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your short circuited into the life of an individual woman who lived here over 5,000 years ago that's before the great pyramids were built so you can imagine her at the end of a hard day nursing her baby getting it off to sleep taking off
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her necklace and putting it on her shelf that was specially built for her things she had snuffed out her oil lamp made of fish fat and settled down to sleep here in the bed that would have been plumped
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up with Heather and sheep skins and wait for this because remains of Ida dark have been found may be lying under a covering of Ida down and if that sounds luxurious how about an onsuite there is a drainage system and
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it runs from the cell over there and appears to be that we're looking at indoor toilets and when they did the excavations in the 20s they found stuff which they interpreted as as human excrement in the drains you go in there
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and there's a hole in the ground and the hole it leads to a drain which is running under the floor so I mean it seems very plausible so I think it's kind of fanciful though that we just we
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as hum it's a really well-designed house and we almost want there to be a in the corner you imagine that it's 11:00 you know on a window's night and it's pitch black I mean maybe you don't want to go
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out through Ting gateways to the outside yeah so maybe indoor toilets are an essential part of just survival yeah I guess you got the technology using yeah I think so Britain's Neolithic Farmers did more than build permanent settlements they
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put down roots and for the first time they developed a business-like relationship with the land they lived on you can see why unlike hunter gatherers who foraged and moved on Farmers turned mile after mile of Woodland into wheat
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fields and pasture they invested their Blood Sweat and Tears into the land that's when society makes a shift after all that work you're going to want your children to benefit not a bunch of strangers to do that you have to
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establish a lineage and the most emphatic way of linking that bloodline to your territory is to display the bones of your ancestors themselves right on the land it seems the bones of the Dead had some kind of tmic power around 3,000 BC
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spectacular tombs appear all over Britain this long Barrow in West kennet in Wilshire is a 100 yd long burial chamber inside with the partial skeletons of about 50 people and dozens of artifacts from daily life building it was a massive
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undertaking gangs of laborers heaved Stones weighing several tons into [Music] place the people who built this didn't just want a convenient resting place for their relatives to treat them just as tombs I think is a fairly simple take on on the
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evidence it's much better perhaps to treat them as these as a as a territorial statement bringing together everyone building the mound is is putting everything into it that represents them the animals that they look after the animals that they hunt
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the Flint tools that they make the Potter that they make and bits of the human population as well are all being gathered together are being placed in this mound it's a big territorial statement and they're seeding the ground
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with their own identity so this the first time they're laying claim to what is theirs large tombs weren't the only way they made their territorial claims Stone AG communities sought out prominent landmarks like Hamilton Hill that Towers over the veil of
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Blackmore but they didn't build castles or Cathedrals to demonstrate their right to the surrounding land they used rotting [Applause] corpses to our eyes Hamilton Hill in its Heyday would have seemed a very gruesome place place for miles around you could
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have seen that the enclosure was covered with human remains in various stages of Decay here there would have been the bones and corpses of men women and children some mutilated some half eaten by animals archaeologists have found the
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bones of more than a 100 Stone Age corpses that had once been displayed here these are the remains of a young man who lived here 5,000 years ago his bones tell a Grizzly tale these cut marks were left on his
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upper arm when razor sharp Flint blades were used like scalpel to loosen the flesh from his bones similar marks were found on his thigh bone or femur someone has deliberately cut or loosened flesh from his bones so why would they be def fleshing
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the bodies that's the kind of question that archaeology can't answer um but we can say they are being def fleshed that may be in connection with cannibalism um which is never a primitive activity it's a ceremonial activity uh in almost every
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society where it occurs um and uh it may be to do with the absorption or the honoring of the spirits of the Dead if this young man was cannibalized as part of a long-forgotten ritual only a small amount of his body was eaten by
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people most of his flesh was stripped off the bones by Scavenging animals there were a large number of dogs around on the site and we found the remains of some of them and the young man whose body had rotted substantially
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and really it was just his his lower abdomen and his upper thighs and legs um were joined together um that mass muscle mass was dragged by dogs uh into the ditch of the cawood enclosure and was consumed there by the dogs so there is
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kny and tooth marks all over his pelvis and his femur this Jagged Edge at the end of his femur is the result of dog Goring on his pelvis you can actually see puncture marks where a dog sank its
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teeth in what's striking is not just the nature of stone AG funeral rights it's the fact that they took place at such a prominent location for all the world to see the remains of cestors may have taken on some significance because uh
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the Val the validation of your right to be on the land lay rested in those remains and indeed it was possibly significant that you could point up the hill and say granddad's up there and that's why I'm here it seems religion and ritual for
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Neolithic Farmers served people's need to connect to the land in Grimes graves in Norfolk they they did this with Britain's first large scale engineering project people always realize this size around 3,000 BC they dug 440 ft deep craters here these were
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Flint mines but it seems they were gloriously Whimsical the stone dug up here with such effort was rarely used to make tools it seems mining had a much more symbolic purpose one of the most dramatic things about this site was all
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the chalk debris would have been up on the surface so there' been these big white mounds of rubble which would have looked really intrusive in the landscape would have really stood out below this modern entrance one of the original mines has been restored to
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its Neolithic [Music] State there's a main Central shaft with small tunnels or galleries radiating out from it what archaeologists found down here confirms that in the bows of the earth ancestral links to the land and religion are woven together far from being an
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industrial site this was a temple there's a feeling of you can't take out from the ground without giving something back so they're putting a lot of votive material in in the bottom levels of the mine what what kind of
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things are being found in these places you get some complete Pottery you get nicely worked Flint axes that have never been used and you get bits of human bodies and they're being carefully placed in these galleries perhaps as a
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religious offering to whatever deity resided in the earth whatever God resided in the earth and it's the closest perhaps we can get to a prehistoric religion you have to admire the Sheer Drive of Neolithic people all they had
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to call on was their muscle and willpower and yet they dug out caves they built mountains they cleared forests in spirit they were our earliest ancestors men and women who wanted to live by controlling the world around them but even the most dynamic of
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cultures can run out of steam and in 2500 BC these Flint shafts were [Music] abandoned religious practice was changing all over the country displaying the bones of ancestors went out of fashion the communal tombs fell into disuse in West kennet this enormous slab
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was erected to seal the entrance closing the door on the past it may be that there have been some form of natural disaster something like that which causes people to doubt whether the ancestors are doing the job they're supposed to yeah and and they
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lose faith in it and maybe someone comes along with an alternative it appears the British yearn for a grander less claustrophobic religion all over the country Stone circles appear some are a few yards across others span Acres it seems people were looking up to
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the heavens for their new Gods but these Stone circles also doubled up as theaters of power the archaeological evidence tells us the population was growing small family groups were coalescing into Clans large groups could gather at the stone circle in a way that
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would be impossible in a mine or a tomb the real leaders are no longer content with just being leaders of communities you know they want a bigger area and they start literally politic in to get a bigger area the new tradition is the
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Stone Circle where it's public theater the way you gain leadership is you know you're a performer on a public stage the rituals performed at places like this are long forgotten but the psychological impact of Standing Stones must have been
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overwhelming these were the statement of a confident people unlike their hunter gatherer predecessors the relationship they had with the land was now on their terms The Monuments are really symbols of Conquest they're human beings Conquering the land they're imposing their will on
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the land we look at these sort of sites today and they appear peaceful they appear sort of tranquil they appear almost sort of mystical at the time there would be nothing like it known to the local population so they would be as
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perhaps as intrusive and as shocking as as the mway is to us today or the the airport of a nuclear power station [Music] these stones have been ripped out of the ground and set up in completely manufactured positions men are sending a
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message to the earth now we're in charge by 2000 BC four Millennia had passed since the island of Britain had formed the hunter gatherer way of life subsisting on the edges of dense forests faded away way Farmers colonized the country and
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the seeds of our modern society were swn they cleared the land and carved it up into [Music] territories they prospered and their Stone circles symbolize this the grandest example Stonehenge is a wonder of the prehistoric World a magnificent feat of engineering it is
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unsurpassed as a statement of man's ability to manipulate his environment in the first age of Britain its people had subjugated nature in the second they would subjugate each other [Music] a
Topics:Stone Age BritainMesolithicNeolithichunter-gatherersBettany HughesBritish historyOronsayScara Braeprehistoric archaeologyBritain as an island
