Back to the Stone Age calendar
Most people were now farming. They had also started to live together in larger groups
than just families. They would be able to share the workload and the rewards. Villages would appear and the only reason to move on was if they needed new land to
graze the cattle on or new fields in which to grow their crops. Villages would also begin to specialise, some growing crops, some breeding animals. Then they
would swap. In those days they had no money. What else is new I hear you say. Well I mean there was no money, notes or coins, at all not just that some had it
and others didn’t. This meant that you paid for goods you wanted with other goods. It was the beginning of trading.
Funnily enough although humans were now settling and clearing away
vast areas of woodland, some other areas were growing back. Hunter-gatherers had kept moving on but had then been replaced by other hunter-gatherers while these
farmers stayed in one place giving a chance for trees to grow again in some areas. The people also used something called coppicing which is the regular cutting
back of a tree or shrub to stimulate the rapid growth of shoots.
Wood was also being used to build small bridges, or trackways, over the marshland that covered a lot of South West England. Europe's first wooden
trackway was built in Somerset in 3,806BC. It was a wooden footpath supported on crossed wooden poles. The people would also make use of the large number of
rivers which existed in England to move about and trade with places a little further away. They made small circular boats from tree branches, often the Ash tree,
and then stretched animal skins over the basic wooden frame. These boats are called coracles and I have heard that a very few are still in use in some parts of the
country.
My pictures show what a typical Stone Age village might look like and also what a coracle looks like.
Forward to 3400BC
