Name: What Happened in the Neolithic? | History in a Nutshell | Animated History
Uploaded: 2020-06-08T04:32:15.000Z
Duration: 3 min 43 s
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What happened in the Neolithic, you ask? Well, the period lasted for nearly 2,000 years in

Britain, so it's a pretty safe bet to say that loads happened. Loads and loads and loads.

The trouble is, we just don't know about most of it.

Because the people of this period didn't write anything down, we've had to piece

together their past from the things they left behind, like monuments, burials and everyday

bits and pieces like stone tools and pots.

First off, the Neolithic period in Britain lasted from about 4,000 BC to 2,300 BC.

The people at the time wouldn't have known they were Neolithic – it's just the name

archaeologists use to describe the time when people began to farm.

Neolithic means 'New Stone Age'. It was the last of three Stone Ages – the first

one, known as the Palaeolithic, began in Britain a whopping nine hundred thousand years ago.

You could say the Stone Age went on for ages and ages and ages.

But let's stick with the Neolithic for now.

People first started farming in the Middle East about 11,000 years ago.

At this point, people in Britain were nomadic hunter-gatherers. Farming didn't reach Britain

for another 7,000 years. Once it arrived here it spread quickly. Farming meant that people

could store food and have supplies of meat, milk and cereals that could last them through

To begin with, farming actually involved a lot more work, a less varied diet and more

infectious diseases. Compared with hunter gatherers, the early farmers were not just

shorter, but their lives were shorter too!

Britain underwent a total transformation in the Neolithic, and that was mostly thanks

From about 4000 BC people in Britain grew new crops like wheat, barley and pulses, and

they herded goats, sheep, pigs and cows. They chopped down woodland and cleared scrub, making

room for fields and space to build monuments.

They began to make simple pottery, and they quarried stone to make polished axes.

From around 3,800 BC they started building communal tombs called long barrows and large

earthwork enclosures, which may have been gathering places. It's possible that people

built the communal tombs to worship their ancestors, perhaps believing that the dead

Later on in the period, they built more mysterious monuments, including the massive earth mound

at Silbury Hill, and, most famously, circles from stone and wood, like Castlerigg, Woodhenge,

Avebury and Stonehenge. Stonehenge was built in about 2,500 BC – that's 180 generations ago!

These were huge undertakings for people with limited technology. Why did they bother faffing

around with all this fancy building work when there was so much farming to be getting on with?

Again, we don't know for certain, but it probably had something to do with how they

saw the world. The sheer amount of effort that went into them suggests that they were

Some monuments, like Stonehenge, were aligned with the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset.

For these farming people, the changing of the seasons and the movements of the sun,

moon and stars must have played a massive part in their beliefs about the world.

Even as Stonehenge was being built, the days of the Neolithic were numbered. Bronze was

coming to Britain, and the Stone Age was drawing to a close.