Back to the Stone Age calendar
Farming had now taken off and the hunters
gatherers had become farmers. England was a good place to farm for several reasons. Firstly the soil, which you remember spent thousands of years under the ice,
was very fertile which meant plants grew well there. Secondly the rivers were good for communication and moving around, a sort of wet information highway and
thirdly the weather, with lots of wet days, was also good for growing. Information took a long time to travel and being able to row down the rivers, or maybe
even sail, could be a lot quicker than walking.
The people who came over from Europe also brought new animals with them,
such as pigs, cows and sheep. These were tame animals which people could keep near there settlements. A settlement is a place where people settled. Bit obvious that
one. The picture shows how one home might look with a house, a space for animals and growing things and an enclosure around the whole area. The animals provided
meat, milk and cheese (cattle) and meat, milk and wool (sheep and goats). Pigs would probably have been kept in the woods nearby.
Remember Great Britain was now an island and so these new settlers, and their animals, would have come across by boat and the boats weren't very big.
They would have been built of wood too, so you would (haha) have to be very lucky to find one that hadn't rotted away.
When I was in a place called Tonga some years ago some young men were taking part in a competition to build a canoe out of an old tree. Basically they
hollowed out the middle of the tree and then smoothed down the sides. You can see a bit of that in the two pictures below. This was probably how Stone Age people
made their boats too. However, it must have been an amazing sight to see small rowing boats full of grunting creatures arriving on the shore, unless of course
you have watched the boat race. Ooops, there may not be an invitation to Oxford or Cambridge for me.
The old way of life of staying somewhere until the food ran out was disappearing and people were building homes that they could stay in for longer.
It might still be that people would have to move on when the land became less fertile or when looking for new pastures to graze their animals, but it didn’t happen
nearly so often. It is interesting that the settlements appeared in Scotland and Ireland first and then in Wales and England. Maybe the weather made it
preferable to build somewhere permanent in colder places. However, as these settlers, the ones who knew about farming, came from Europe you would think they
reached England first. Your turn for ideas on this one.
Forward to 3900BC
