The French province of Brittany has always had a unique history. The massive and extraordinary site Avebury adds to the mystery of Brittany, but the true beauty of Avebury can only be appreciated from the air. Avebury is home to as many as 3000 standing stones. It is a monumental area where changes have been made since its initial construction. Long before Rome or the Celts even existed, before metal had even been molded, this was a sacred landscape. When this site was first investigated during the 1700s, the stones had initially been attributed to druids. According to legend, these stones are the Roman legionaries that were turned to stone by the wizard Merlin. Because of radiocarbon dating, we now know that the stones remained important throughout the centuries, and they have taken on new meaning for every new group that came to live in this area. The origin of this site probably took place around 5000 B.C.
At first glance, this site seems like the perfect place to inhabit during the fifth millennium BC. It is a world based on farming crops and domesticated animals, a way of life that could sustain much larger populations and thus replaced the much less populous hunter-gatherer societies that held sway in Europe before. But in the centuries immediately following 5000 BC, Brittany was still very much populated by hunter-gatherers. The archaeological findings left behind suggest very different lifestyles. It is still a topic of debate whether hunters were replaced with people who farmed or if they started living according to the new world.
Dolmens, or stone tombs, carved by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, tentatively dating around 4900 BC, still exist today. They could have also been shrines. Gobekli Tepe is an example of this type of monumental architecture constructed by hunter-gatherers. Mesolithic hunters also erected the earliest stones at Carnac, whether or not they had already adopted agriculture. Perhaps this was their way of reaching out to their gods for news about the new cultures in the east.
The World of Hunters
Evidence of the Mesolithic world or the Middle Stone Age survives today only in fragments. It’s been so long since these people lived that the vast majority of evidence for their lives hasn’t survived, especially as newer settlements built and rebuilt over pre-existing ones in particularly habitable areas. For the most part, we have to look to peripheral land for evidence, where places left unchanged for thousands of years were never consumed by modern architecture or towns due to their marginal nature. The people who lived at sites like Star Carr in Yorkshire Gough’s Cave and Aveline’s Hole in Somerset, Cramond and the Hebrides in Scotland, and Mount and Sandal in Ireland relied entirely on the wild animals and plants that lived around them, just as they had done for hundreds of thousands of years – living with nature, not outside of it like those after the Neolithic farmers. And unlike later peoples, they lived entirely according to nature’s whim, having no control over adverse conditions, bad food supply, and harsh winters. Their very existence depended on their ability to maintain themselves and their connection with a natural environment they knew intimately.
After the last ice age, the descendants of mammoth hunters lived in a changing landscape known as the boreal from around 8800 to 5800 BC, which was a warmer, drier period than they had ever experienced before. This period saw a rise in birch, alder, hazel, and finally oak. This woodland was not different than the pockets that still exist today.
Mesolithic Era 13,000–3500 BC
Mesolithic people were still nomadic, and they were still hunter-gatherers, but there is evidence to suggest that they were more settled than the people who had been living in this part of the world for a very long time. In this new climate, many people would have lived and died within the same area, rather than traversing the immense distances traveled by their predecessors. Instead of mammoths and reindeer, people hunted red deer and orox in the wild. Mesolithic Britain may have been populated by less than 5,000 people with the highest estimates standing at a meager 20,000.
There is evidence that suggests that Mesolithic people preferred to stay on coastlines and adjacent river valleys, putting down their roots in these lands, but the evidence is so little that we cannot be sure about it. The reason why we do not find much evidence is that these people probably performed excarnation rather than burial, leaving their people out in the open. We only find untouched corpses in the funerary sites, like caves or in the deep hills of Somerset.
Unfortunately, many of these sites were discovered too early for meaningful conclusions to be derived from them. For example, a mass grave of somewhere between 50 and 200 people was discovered at Aveline’s Hole in the last years of the 18th century. Red ochre and perforated animal teeth suggested that the bodies may have been dressed for the afterlife, hinting at prehistoric Stone Age ceremonies.
Unfortunately, driven by war, Britain during those years had other priorities and much of the collection tentatively dated to somewhere around 8400 to 8200 BC is now lost. In 1903, cheddar man (7100 BC) was discovered. Luckily, it was a time when archaeological techniques had been honed and sharpened. Cheddar men are so rare that even footprints found in the sand at Formby Point near the Mersey Estuary and gold cliff had to be carefully excavated by researchers. The most important information comes from the camps once inhabited by the people who inhabited Thatcham in the Kennett Valley, Star Carr in Yorkshire, and Cramond near Edinburgh. There were later examples too at sites such as Howick House in Northumbria.
Mesolithic settlements would have been imbued with the smell of animal remains infused into everything these people did. Tools made from animal remains were used for everything from clothing to houses. At Star Carr, there is evidence that suggests that these people domesticated a dog, probably as a sheepdog, to confuse hunted animals in the forest.
Mysterious postholes found in Mesolithic contexts even suggest some kind of ritual activity, perhaps like the stone circles of later ages. Scholars suggest that several Neolithic holy sites may have had Mesolithic antecedents in a situation not too dissimilar to early Christian churches being built. In around 8000 BC, on an ancient lakeside in what is now Yorkshire, antler skull dresses were placed in the water, maybe in a tradition that would continue on and off up to Roman Britain and beyond as a form of ritual deposition to separate them from the world of the living.
Mesolithic people were dependent on nature in a spiritual sense as much as a practical one. Though no sculpted wood and very little stone from the Middle Stone Age survives in Britain, incredible examples were found elsewhere, such as the Elk’s head of Huittinen dated between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago; one of the best-known archaeological finds in Finland; and the majestic Shigir Idol of Russia, made in around 9500 BC by people living very similar lifestyles to those in Britain.
Atlantic Period
From around 5800 to 4000 BC, a warm wet period kicked in, known as the Atlantic. The number of hunter-gatherer sites in Ireland and Britain increased. Unique regional variances between cultures were noticeable by this time in the last flourishing of the Middle Stone Age.
In 1999, just off the coast of the Isle of Wight in southern Britain, a lobster was spotted moving around flint tools on the seabed. Soon enough, underwater archaeologists moved in, and one of the most important Mesolithic sites ever found in Britain was uncovered.
Dating to around 6000 BC, timber architectural work – Bouldnor Cliff – was found to be so advanced that it was previously only associated with the arrival of the Neolithic some 2,000 years later. Some sort of a boat-making workshop further suggested far-reaching links with the continent. In 2015, a DNA study uncovered evidence of wheat at the site, a crop not thought to have arrived in Britain for thousands of years yet. The site remains controversial with many researchers arguing that the wheat was later contaminated.
The World of Farmers
In the centuries around 4000 BC, a collection of new technologies drastically altered life in Britain. The arrival of the Neolithic wasn’t like the industrial or agricultural revolutions of modern times; it was much slower and more gradual, though productive for the group overall. For the individual, this societal change came with a price. Once the old skills of the forest lost, a farming society was adopted. If crops fail with a far larger population to feed, a much more devastating collapse is in the cards, which included animal husbandry and generally living in a much dirtier environment than before due to population rise. Disease was much more rife and dangerous than before, along with a much less varied diet due to reliance on just a few crops, especially as time went on, and increasingly, only higher status individuals have regular access to meat. The transition from a wild diet to domesticated food was the most critical shift in all of human history. To those who lived through it, it happened in stops and starts, gradually shifting. Yet once the ball was rolling, it was near impossible to get out of the trap.
The growing population itself would spur on more growth in turn until it was unstoppable. A tipping point and cumulative effect put more and more pressure on the environment, and in turn, pressured younger males to push out on their own to create new settlements, carrying their way of life wherever they went. This scale had never been seen before.
A site found on the Sea of Galilee named Ohalo II, dated around 23,000 years ago, hints at a settlement reliant on fish and possibly grain with evidence for early sickle blades for harvesting being present. It isn’t for another 10,000 years at least that the harvesting of seeds stuck, perhaps occurring as a result of climate change during harsh, dry years. Other ideas were put forward, such as the feasting hypothesis with local strongmen wishing to amass enough food so they could impress their neighbors. The first solid evidence of humans altering their environment by harnessing crops and animals on a wide scale is found in the Fertile Crescent at the end of the last ice age.
This is a region where eight founder crops appear, Emmer: einkorn, wheat, barley, peas, lentils, chickpeas, flax, and bitter vetch. Wheat was probably the first, though no exact consensus has been reached. Interestingly, fig trees are also found in the record, hinting at an early form of horticulture as people carried seeds around with them to plant. Potentially, before the harvesting of wheat, a similar way of life evolved independently in the Amazon rainforest. Soon enough, permanent towns and early cities began to develop at sites like Jericho. Over the coming generations, the new way of life gradually spread across Anatolia until finally, by as early as 9,000 BC, Neolithic farmers came across the waters to take up residence on the islands of the Aegean, the first part of Europe to be populated by these people. The Europe these people entered was a very different world from the one in which they stomped. They found a thickly forested continent, seemingly with no end. For several thousand years, much of this woodland would be hacked and burned with farmers practicing slash-and-burn agriculture. In many areas, trees would never return.
But what happened to the people who already lived there? There is evidence that some hunter-gatherer groups adopted the new lifestyle of the farmers. DNA evidence suggests that the LBK culture, which spread along the river valleys of Central Europe to the west, was a mostly demographic expansion.
On the continent, many mass graves that date to the Neolithic period have been found, but the question remains: were they the result of internal conflicts within the farmer societies? We do have evidence of violence within hunter-gatherer societies, particularly during the later 5th millennium BC.
Antlers were fashioned into tools as weapons of war to trespass into another’s land at your own risk. Hunter-gatherers would have been more than a match for any Neolithic farmer, but of course, living in a highly competitive and populated world, the farmers were adept at war too. By the Danube, the Neolithic had been reaching their collective tendrils towards Britain for many centuries, each having taken different routes into Europe from Anatolia. These newcomers were not unified, each small clan independent of the next. When they met in what is now modern-day France, some of these groups had been apart culturally from one another. For thousands of years, they were potentially just as hostile to each other, if not more so, as they were against Mesolithic hunters. This was a frontier zone of disparate tribes mixing and merging cultural traditions with diverse geographical origins.
This is how hunter-gatherers became farmers, and we see diverse cultures in the same community. For people living this life, it would not have been easy. All the changes were drastic and hard to adapt to.
