Ancient Civilisations - The Stone Age

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

The Stone Age is the foundational period of human history, stretching from roughly 3 million to 5,000 years ago, and accounting for over 99% of humanity’s time on earth. It’s the era when modern humans evolved and migrated out of Africa to populate the globe, developed language and the ability to make tools, and learned to farm crops and domesticate animals. But what do we really know about the way our Stone Age relatives lived? What role did the shifting climate play in their evolution? And how are our ancestors reflected in our bodies, lifestyles and communities today? This is a Short History Of The Stone Age.  A Noiser Production, written by Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow. With thanks to Dr James Dilley, founder of AncientCraft, an organisation teaching prehistoric skills and techniques at universities and museums across the world. For ad-free listening, exclusive content, and early access to new episodes across the Noiser network, join ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Noiser+⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠noiser.com/subscriptions⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is a balmy summer's night in Avebury, a tranquil village in southwest England. A young woman gets out of her car and hurries across a small car park in the center of the village. She is dressed casually in shorts and an oversized woolen jumper and carries a picnic blanket and a torch. Checking both ways for oncoming headlights, she crosses the busy road that tears through the heart of the village, then unlatches a waist-high wooden gate that opens into a large field. The grass brushing softly against her ankles is long and lush at this time of year and dotted with daisies. But she is not here for a pleasant evening walk. As she reaches the top of a slight incline, she finds what she came for.

Here, the inky blackness of the night is broken up by a number of fires. The flickering light provides snapshots of the small crowd spread out before her. Families mingle with older people dressed in swirling robes. Groups of giggling teenagers sipping from illicit cans of beer stand next to women dressed as wood nymphs. A couple wearing deer antler headdresses hold hands and chant, while a man plays a steady beat on a large animal skin drum. But what draws the young woman's eye is the immense stone circle that surrounds them. She weaves her way through the crowd and approaches one of the upright stones. It towers over her, almost four meters tall.

Laying her hand on its rough, weathered surface, she can feel the heat of the day held in the grayish sandstone, even though the sun set hours earlier. She dumps her belongings at its base and hurries to join the other revelers. Like them, she has come to the Neolithic Stone Circle at Avebury, the largest in the world, to observe the summer solstice. In a few hours, the sun will rise, and they will be here to witness the start of the longest day of the day of the day. the year. It is a ritual probably celebrated at Avebury since its construction 5,000 years ago. But though it is still dark, the celebrations are well underway. The woman is pulled into a dance circle by three others wearing fairy wings and flower crowns. They spin around and around until she's dizzy and laughing. For the next few hours, she alternates between dancing, sharing drinks and food

with friends and strangers, and soaking up the atmosphere. An hour or a little bit of the air. A few hours, she alternates, Before dawn, she is sitting cross-legged on her blanket, back against the stone. Her eyes are trained on the east. The minutes tick by. Almost imperceptibly, the sky begins to lighten. As a bird starts to sing, a hush falls over the gathering. The woman stands. In the distance, the golden edge of the rising sun emerges from beneath the horizon.

begins a slow chart as the first brilliant rays shine directly through the perfectly aligned stone. Daylight floods the circle. Just as it has since time immemorial, the summer solstice has arrived at Avebury and a group of celebrants stand ready to meet it. At prehistoric sites like Avebury, our stone age past feels close. We can literally touch the monumental stones that were erected thousands of years ago. for mysterious ritual purposes. And at times like the solstice, we can connect with the landscape and the changing seasons, just as our ancient ancestors did, a moment of connection across the millennia, and tangible proof of our prehistoric past. The Stone Age is the foundational period of human history.

This vast epoch, stretching from roughly 3 million to 5,000 years ago, accounts for over 99% of humanity's time on this planet. It is the era when modern humans evolved and migrated out of Africa to populate the globe, when we developed language and the ability to make tools, when we learned to farm crops and domesticate animals and began to live in ever more complex societies. So what do we know about the way our Stone Age relatives lived? What role did the shifting climate play in their evolution and how are our ancestors reflected in our bodies, lifestyles and communities today? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Network, this is the Stone Age. The term Stone Age refers to a colossal span of time and gets its name from the development of stone tools used by our homonym, or

human-like ancestors. Dr. James Dilley is the founder of Ancient Craft, an organization teaching prehistoric skills and techniques at universities and museums around the world. Our earliest evidence for the start of the Stone Age dates to around 3.3 million years ago and comes in the form of crudely flaked stone tools from Lamekwe in Kenya. The Stone Age is broken down into several different periods because of the sheer extent of the time period. Archaeologists tend to think of the Stone Age in terms of three sub-periodes, the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic, and though there are no human beings on the planet for much of this unimaginably lengthy stretch of time, in due course our homonym ancestors emerge.

These include Australopithecus aferensis, the first homonym to be fully bipedal, meaning to walk on two feet. 1.8 million years ago, Homo erectus evolves. Proportionally similar to modern humans, they are able to walk long distances on their strong legs. And so they are the first hominin to migrate out of Africa, the cradle of human life. Over the course of the next million years, various hominins acquire a number of technologies that will be essential to modern humans. As well as offering warmth, the mastery of fire means that food can now be cooked. In Kenya, Homo Agasta begins to fashion a range of teardrop-shaped hand tools from stone.

The diversification of this simple tool suggests collective learning, the ability to improve an object through trial and error and pass that knowledge on. This level of communication is made possible thanks to another likely development of this period, that of language. The human language is very difficult to trace. Aside from looking at the development of bones and organs in our throats and mouths that could suggest sounds humans made, we are looking for the most complex yet fleeting evidence that makes us humans the way we communicate. When I'm teaching people to make stone tools on a workshop, I'm relying heavily on spoken language and miming to illustrate the steps and processes.

involved in making a stone axe. These are the same steps and processes people faced nearly two million years ago. So is it possible language developed alongside stone tools? Our hands certainly did, and I can imagine younger members of an early hominid group watching a parent flaking a stone axe and being shown certain steps with basic gestures.

Astonishingly recently, within the nearly three million year history of the Stone Age, anatomically similar modern humans evolve from these tool-making, fire-using communicative forebears. It appears our species emerges somewhere in Africa. The earliest remains of an individual that seems to be a Homo sapien, meaning wise human in Latin, come from Morocco and date to around 315,000 years ago. This is where the story of humanity as we know it begins. Though Homo sapiens Begin in Africa, they do not remain there for long. There had been various waves of outward migration by hominins,

starting two million years ago with Homo erectus. Homo sapiens soon get in on the act. We see the first dispersal of early Homo sapiens around 200,000 years ago, which appeared to have been followed by several more. The main dispersal that led to the colonization of the globe was around 70,000 and 50,000. years ago. Their route appears to have been through the northeast corner of Africa and into the Levant. From there they spread into Asia and reach Australia around 50,000 years ago and North America sometime

around 15,000 years ago. Europe sees Homo sapiens arriving from just over 60,000 years ago in a succession of incursions before they spread into northern Europe. Humans are able to migrate great so far because during the Paleolithic period, the Earth is radically different from the one we are familiar with today. Much of the Paleolithic overlaps with the Pleistocene geological period, or to give it its more popular name, the Ice Age. Vast expanses of ice sheets locked up huge amounts of water, exposing areas of land that people populated. One of the most famous lost landscapes is known as Doggerland, named after the Doggerland, named after the Doga sandbank in the North Sea between Britain and Scandinavia. There would have been a time in which people in the Paleolithic and Mesolithic could have

walked from Ireland across what would be the Irish Sea, across England and through Doggerland to Sweden. Having crossed out of Africa via the Middle East and dispersed in all directions, low sea levels allow our ancestors to migrate to Australia from Asia around 60,000 years ago. In a similar fashion, with so much of the Earth's water held in ice sheets, there is a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, across which humans eventually cross into the Americas. The process takes many tens of thousands of years, but eventually humans will have colonized virtually every corner of the globe. As they continue on their travels, different groups of Homo sapiens make a surprising discovery.

are not the only humans on the planet. Around 100,000 BC, about half a dozen human species lived on the earth at the same time. While some never came into contact with each other, at other times they may have coexisted in the same region or even the same cave site. As they venture into Asia, homo sapiens encounter and interbreed with Denisovans, possibly an entirely separate species, or perhaps just a subspecies of ancient human. And in your own, In Europe, they come into contact with Neanderthals, the first human species to permanently call the continent home. Neanderthals, just like the Homo sapiens who join them in Europe, produce stone tools, create fire, make art and possibly even wear simple poncho-like clothing. There are some differences between the two species, though.

Neanderthals are shorter and stockier than modern humans, with broad barrel-like chests and short limbs, as well as broad, flat noses. broad flat noses. These adaptations make them perfectly suited to hunt and survive in the frigid European climates of the period. They were very durable hunters, incredibly strong, excellent visual and motor skills and powerful runners, all characteristics that suited close engagement with large mammals. We also see significant injuries in Neanderthal bones. They put themselves in some risky scenarios during hunts that must have caused fatalities or injured important group members for periods of time. The idea that Neanderthals would drive large elephants or mammoths off the edge of a cliff

is unfortunately a Victorian fairy tale. But we do know that they were able to use cliff faces or bottlenecks to help drive these large and dangerous mammals into a position that made it much easier for them to hunt. As well as being impressive hunters, Neanderthals also care for one another. Modern archaeologists have found healed injuries in Neanderthal skeletons and evidence that they consumed medicinal plants. Recent research even shows that a group of Neanderthals in Spain included a child with a congenital disorder, not unlike Downs syndrome.

Their skull anatomy shows that they would have been severely disabled, experiencing debilitating vertigo attacks and deafness. But the child survived until the age of around six, suggests their community looked after them and helped ensure they were well fed. It is a far cry from the barbaric caveman image Neanderthals are often saddled with in popular media. When Homo sapiens and Neanderthals meet, they often coexist peacefully. We know that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals came across each other at multiple points. We see that either in the technology,

with some diffusion between Homo sapien technology into Neanderthal technology or just from a genetic point of view. Unless you're from sub-Saharan Africa or even further south, there is a very high likelihood that you'll have a small amount of Neanderthal within you today. Despite what appear to be cordial relations between the species, Neanderthals die out within 10,000 years of Homo sapiens arriving in Europe. One older theory as to why posits that modern humans exterminated and replaced a clearly inferior species. Nowadays, archaeologists emphasize the superior adaptability of homo sapiens at a time of climate instability

as the reason we survive and our stocky cousins do not. At the height of the glacial maximum in Europe, so that's when the ice sheets were at their greatest extent, An average July temperature in central France could be as low as 5 degrees Celsius or 41 Fahrenheit. One of the clearest examples of Homo sapiens' ability to be adaptable and technologically flexible is in the materials they used for their equipment. They start using bone and antler alongside stone for tools and equipment. This is not something Neanderthors do anywhere near as uniformly as Homo sapiens. To me, this is evidence that Homo sapiens were extremely good risk managers and flexible planners,

possibly something Neanderthals were not. By around 40,000 years ago, homo sapiens are the only remaining human species on the planet. With the earth still in the icy grip of the Pleistocene, life is hard. Even for the adaptable Paleolithic humans who have outlived the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Though the exact nature of their communities remains unclear, they tend to stay in small, nomadic groups, fishing, hunting birds and animals, and foraging for nuts, berries and fruits. One characteristic remains the same across the planet. Humans are adaptable, opportunistic survivors. They have to be. Because the Ice Age is not one continuous cold spell, but marked by dramatic and sometimes abrupt changes in rainfall. fall and temperature. Depending on where in the world they are, humans are forced to move to new areas as the ice sheets spread and retreat throughout the Paleolithic period, and as coastlines

and waterways change as a result. Hunter-gatherers use different strategies to find food. Sometimes they're quite specialized or more opportunistic, and by opportunistic they will try and hunt or take an animal that walks past in a valley, whereas specialized hunting groups will track down and follow particular prey species and sometimes particular ages within a certain herd. And we have plenty of examples of ice age hunters that would specialize on not just reindeer, but reindeer of a particular sex and age. We also see where hunter-gatherers were able to be flexible with their food economy. They were able to shift over to collecting shellfish or relying on smaller mammals when they needed to, because they didn't know an area and they had to take what they could get.

The stone tools from which this period of history gets its name are a crucial part of Paleolithic humans' survival strategy. The first stone tools were very simple flakes, detached from a larger rock called a core or nucleus. They might have been simple, but the edges of freshly broken stone can be razor sharp. Just under two million years ago, we see the appearance of an iconic tool from the Stone Age, the Handaxe. The hand axe is a tool that allowed people to dismember a carcass much, much quicker and much larger carcasses. The ability, not just to make stone tools, but to produce specialized items for different tasks, to test and refine them

and then pass on this knowledge to other group members is a fundamental part of what makes us human. We can see this in our bodies to this day. Our hands have evidently evolved around the creation of stone tools in the way that we can hold certain things in a comfortable way and in quite a diverse way.

One of our classic grips is known as a hammer grip and you just have to imagine holding a hammer in your hand, which a large number of primates can achieve. But through many experiments, they just can't quite achieve making stone tools in the same way as some of these very early hominids. This is probably a balance between cognitive abilities as well as actual practical stone tool-making ability. When they are not hunting or foraging for food,

the way in which Paleolithic hunter-gatherers spend their time is somewhat opaque. Without written records, archaeologists have to rely on the most fragmentary evidence to build a picture of their lives. The Stone Age and prehistory in general is an incredibly distant time period and we are missing so much. I try to use the analogy of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, but we are missing most of those pieces as you open the box. As you remove that picture, you go through that 10,000. years of degradation in the ground, so you're only left with maybe five pieces. And those five pieces might be a scattering of stone tools, maybe some broken fragments of bone or pottery, maybe if we're very lucky, some preserved pieces of wood.

But it's evident that food and shelter are not the only things on the minds of Paleolithic people. They also have the time and inclination to indulge their more creative sides. It is a bitingly cold night in northern Spain, around 25,000 BC. The wind gusts around the rocky hillside, and the temperature is near freezing. A blood-curdling howl sounds in the distance, a wolf most likely. Head bent against the sleet that blows horizontally into his face, a man wrapped in animal skins, approaches a cave entrance and ducks inside, hurrying to get out of the cold.

his way down a dark passage, he runs his fingers along the rocky walls that surround him to retain his bearings. Hearing the cheerful sound of voices, he turns a corner and the soft firelight up ahead lifts the oppressive blackness that surrounds him. Once he reaches the cave's central chamber, he breathes a sigh of relief. The space is filled with his extended family and other members of his tribe who wave and call greetings as he enters. He shrugs off the wolf, blanket that he is wrapped in and spreads it out by the fire to dry. It is much warmer in here, and the sense of wood smoke and drying furs mingle with the delicious aroma of roasting meat. Before he can get some food, or even catch his breath, his little

daughter runs up and grabs his hand, leading him over to a cluster of children standing in the corner. The man's sister is crouched down amongst them, showing the youngsters are to paint handprints on the cave's wall. As the man watches, she presses a small boy's hand against the uneven stone surface. Next, she picks up a small bone dish filled with crushed ochre, a natural clay earth pigment with a reddish color.

Tipping a small amount between her lips, she swills it around her mouth before puffing out her cheeks and blowing the resulting mixture all over the boy's hand. He giggles as his skin is covered with the gory-looking. splatter. When he pulls away, the children all crane to see the ghostly impression of his hand on the wall, surrounded by a border of red paint. Soon, they're all clamoring to have a go.

The man leaves his daughter to it, and sits down by the fire, feeling the heat seep into his chilled bones. He casts his gaze up to the ceiling of the cave, taking in the other artworks, Black and red outlines of horses and bison sketched onto the pale stone. In the flickering firelight, the animals almost seem to move as he observes them. The horses' powerful leg muscles bunching as they run, the bison's thick neck moving from side to side as it shakes its horned head. It is almost like he is on the plains outside, encountering these majestic animals in the wild. Now his daughter returns, throwing herself down in his lap. Her mouth and hand are covered in ochre, and she excitedly points to the cave wall, showing where she has placed her handprint.

The man smiles. When they move on tomorrow, his family will have left their mark. A lasting record of their presence, stamped forever on the wall of this cave. The earliest evidence of humans indulging their creative impulses is found at Blombos Cave in South Africa, where the artwork could be up to 100,000 years old. Here, tens of thousands of years before humans start painting on cave walls, artists engrave lines and cross-hatched patterns on pieces of ochre, maybe to use for body painting or to create further undiscovered artworks.

They also create personal ornaments out of shells and beads. As they spread out of Africa, it seems that early humans take their artistic talents with them, to Europe, Southeast Asia, Australia and beyond. Cave art has been found almost everywhere around the world. Currently, Karam Poyang Hill in the Indonesian island of South Sulawesi has the oldest cave art dating to over 51,000 years ago. These would have been created by some of the first Homo sapiens to reach the region. Paleolithic Indonesians create works of art in at least 300,000.

hundred sites. In one, an unknown artist draws what is now the earliest known example of representational art anywhere in the world, a depiction of the Sulawesi walti pig. But this community is not alone in their desire to draw the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it. The most commonly represented artwork is animals. These were the animals that the painters will have seen on a day-to-day basis. They were an important part of their world. world. Some painters clearly had an eye for capturing accurate anatomical detail. The outlines of muscle structures or body shape to indicate sex wasn't casually done. There was a great deal of care in making the artwork stand out. In some cases, they used the natural shapes of cave walls to help make their

paintings appear three-dimensional or even move in the flicker of torch or lamp light. In Europe, around 40,000 years BC, Paleolithic artists render detailed depictions of reindeer, horses, bison, wild cattle, ibecks and mammoths. At Chauvet Cave in southeastern France, someone uses charcoal to sketch a series of lions hunting bison on the wall, almost like a comic strip. Over thousands of years, successive generations of artists at Altamira Cave in northern Spain create hand stencils and paint vividly colored and exquisitely detailed bison alongside horses and deer. When they are rediscovered in 1879 by local landowner Mathelino Sands de Sautuola, many eminent archaeologists at first refused to believe such vibrant and accomplished

drawings could have been done by stone-age humans. Surprisingly, one thing these Paleolithic creatives are not interested in drawing is themselves. When they do create pictures of humans, they are usually simple when compared to the elaborate paintings of animals. In some cases, artists imagine human-animal hybrids. At Le Trois-Fruhe Cave in southwestern France, one inventive individual draws a bison standing upright on human legs and playing a musical instrument. And in Germany, someone creates a small statuette of a figure who is half man, half lion. Why? The Creative Impulse.

Whether they wanted to capture them for good luck on the next hunt or to help tell stories, we don't know, probably a mix of several reasons. In many cases, the painters were creating their artwork in cave spaces that were not used as dwelling spaces. These were special places that were perhaps reserved for gathering, rituals or storytelling. Some cave art areas would have been hard to actually. so it's possible they were created as a rite of passage. Art is not the only cultural development to emerge in the later or upper Paleolithic era,

especially in Europe. Various important everyday items are invented, including needles and thread, animal skin clothing, harpoons and fishn equipment. And alongside cave painting, people find creative outlets in music and dancing, religious ceremonies and magical fertility rituals. Around 11.5,000 years ago, the Pleistocene Age comes to an end, and with it, the Paleolithic period. Global temperatures warm. The ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere retreat, and the vast reserves of water they had kept locked up are released. Sea levels rise, rivers and waterways

change course, and some areas of land become submerged. The altered climate also brings about changes in plant and animal life. Once again, humans are forced to adapt. People still live as small bands of hunter-gatherers, so not too much of a change. However, their hunting strategies have to change to suit the change in flora and fauna of a forested Mesolithic world

from the barren open grasslands of the end of the Paleolithic. In some parts of the world, especially in warmer areas, people begin to settle down permanently. There they start to build houses and even ritual monuments. Here in Britain, we have very small populations of Mesolithic hunters that were living in seasonal camps hunting deer and fish. Over in what is now Turkey, hunter-gatherers start to build incredible stone structures that might have been early settlements or ritual spaces, such as Glebeki-Tepi, which have these incredible T-shaped stone pillars, some covered in artwork.

Climate changes become lifestyle changes. As the number of animals to hunt and plants to forage increase, people no longer have to constantly move around to find food. They start to settle down, leaving traces we can study. These include the well-preserved finds from the Mesolithic settlements of Star Carr in the North the north of England and the large deposits of projectiles and woodworking tools that characterize the Natchikufan culture of northern Zambia. From these finds, archaeologists can work out how these post-ice-age communities lived. It is 9,000 BC, an overcast day in early autumn. In a forest of slender birch trees in northern England, a small group is out hunting. Their leader treads

carefully as he picks his way through the trees, trying to make as little noise as possible. Rain drips through the leafy canopy and onto his bare hands. He listens carefully to the rustle of small animals in the undergrowth and the trickling of a nearby stream. A hunter glances to his left and right, checking the positions of his group. Like him, they are dressed in animal skins and carry wooden spears with wickedly sharp stone points. unlike him, their heads are bare. He is wearing an elaborate antler headdress, laboriously crafted from the skull of a red deer. Part good luck talisman, part disguise, wearing it is supposed to help them catch their prey.

And today, they have come into the forest looking for more deer. From somewhere up ahead comes the roar of a stag. The leader throws up a hand, and his leader throws up a hand, and his His companions come to a halt, waiting as he scans the dense woodland for sight of their quarry. There, just a few steps ahead, a flash of reddish-brown fur. The man lets loose a wild cry and takes off through the trees, spear at the ready, the other hunters hot on his heels. As he gets nearer, he lets his weapon fly, aiming for the animal's broad chest.

His aim is true, and the razor-sharp flint point buries itself in the deer's heart. Death is mercifully swift. Breathing heavily, the leader directs the other men and women to pick up the deer. It is a short but slow walk back to their settlement on the edge of a nearby lake, awkwardly carrying the swinging deer carcass between them. But they take care not to damage its spectacular rack of antlers. As they reach the village, several people run out to help lower the deer to the ground. They are joined by a woman wielding a small flint knife who crouches next to the carcass

and begins the painstaking process of removing the head. It is only the first of many steps it will take to create another headdress, just like the one that brought him such good fortune on this hunt. Star Carr, in the Vale of Pickering in Yorkshire, is perhaps the most famous Mesolithic site in Britain. Dating to around 9,000 BC, it gives us an insight into the lives lived by people in the Northern Hemisphere in the years after the retreat of the ice sheets. There is a campsite that was occupied by Mesolithic people, and they would live there during the seasonal months that would allow them to come in and make use of some of the edible plants and animals that would have migrated in the area. They built small platforms and shelters near the edge of the lake, but their main focus, their food economy, was focused towards red deer.

We have so many deer bones that have been found at this site. It is most famous for the striking Antler headdresses that have been discovered there, whose purpose is still something of a mystery. The iconic object from this site, which isn't totally unique to the Mesolese, are these incredibly enigmatic red deer antler skull caps. They're often known as headdresses because they may well have been worn on the head, and that seems to be the main theory, but whether they were worn as some kind of ritual attire or even hunting disguise remains unknown.

They were part of an unusual seasonal activity, that you can imagine if these hunters were wearing them on their heads of an evening around a campfire with perhaps chanting, maybe music. It's a scene that really conjures up the intensity of life back then that unfortunately we're missing so much of. Exactly who among the community might have been involved in the hunting itself is also something that's up for scrutiny. Recent research has shown that while previous historians have described

a clearly gendered division of labour in these early societies. The true picture might not be so simple. In Peru, the 9,000-year-old remains of a young woman were found, buried with a knife, spear tips, and other equipment, leading researchers to assume she was a respected huntress. Archaeologists have also identified on females the kind of traumatic injuries associated with being kicked by an animal. More evidence they may have been involved in ambush-style hunting.

Indeed, these ancient groupings of humans were likely too small to allow members to practice only specialized roles. A stone age man or woman needed to be a generalist to survive. But while in places like Starcar, the Mesolithic is characterized by an intensification of food collection and hunting, in other parts of the world, a full-blown transformation in the way humans eat is underway. Certain communities start to deliberately cultivate crops and domesticate. animals. The agricultural revolution, often considered the most important turning point in world

history, has begun. The starting point seems quite clearly to be in the Levant region, which is also known as the Fertile Crescent. After the Ice Age, long dry periods favoured annual plants that leave behind seeds or root vegetables. While humans had been gathering seeds from wild grasses for many tens of thousands of years. It's not until around 20,000 years ago that we start to see evidence of small-scale cultivation near the shore of the Sea of Galilee. It wouldn't be until around 12,000 years ago that we see cultivation of wheat, barley, peas and lentils. Pigs and cattle were domesticated soon after in Mesopotamia and the area of modern Turkey. The area known as the Fertile Crescent, a region in the Middle East around the Tigris-Euphrates

River Basin, is the natural habitat of animals and plants that prove to be domesticable, including various grains and legumes, and sheep, goats, cattle and pigs. One of these communities is the Natufian culture, which spans present-day Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. They begin to live in settlements of round huts, some built with. solid stone foundations. They make bread and brew beer, using either the grain they cultivate or the wild plants that grow in the area. Later, around 7,000 BC, in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan, the earliest known farming village is founded. The community is made up of around 150 individuals, who live in 20 rectangular huts, each with several separate rooms. They grow wheat, barley,

and peas and keep goats, sheep, pigs and dogs. And from around 6,000 BC, farming villages, some in small interdependent clusters, emerge across the Middle East. From its Middle Eastern origins, agriculture spreads to different regions, where strategies of crop cultivation and animal husbandry are adapted to local conditions. Cats and donkeys originate in Africa, and so are first domesticated there. In Neolithic China, rice is cultivated in the south, while millet dominates the north. Silkworms are also domesticated, and chickens, cattle and soybeans all follow. Agriculture emerges in Neolithic Britain in around 4000 BC.

Farming emerges in the Americas only a little later than it does in the Middle East, and here it is thought to be an independent innovation. In Mexico, squash, peppers and beans are eventually cultivated, as well as some varieties of maize. So why do so many people all over the world make the switch from foraging to farming? Previously, it was believed the idea of farming spread and hunter-gatherers mostly invested in this new idea.

However, we now have genetic evidence to show that Neolithic farmers themselves spread and succeeded the hunter-gatherers. The genetic evidence in Britain shows that As soon as the Neolithic farmers arrived, they replaced the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers within 200 years, leaving almost no trace of them. Farming typically leads people to settle down and build permanent homes. They start to live in one place, in communities of ever-increasing size. The impact from the advent of agriculture and farming was quite incredible, from small groups of

of mobile hunter-gatherers, we see more permanent settlements of larger populations. People begin to invest time and effort into land for their food. The spread of farming and agriculture, which marks out the Neolithic, also brings with it new technologies, belief systems, culture and practices. Many regions start using pottery for the first time and begin producing stone axes to fell woodland on a large scale. However, not all impacts of the agricultural revolution are positive. Farming does not necessarily improve people's diets or health, and they must work longer hours

to cultivate crops than they ever did hunting or foraging. The basic stone and wood tools they use often means the work is back-breaking, nutritional standards decrease, and life expectancy shortens. The stories told by the bones of Neolithic people are of hard lives of manual. labor, often with insufficient food. And then there are the other societal blights that accompany the advent of farming, famine, disease, and violence. We see people living in quite compact settlements almost on top of each other, but with so many people living very close to each other, the chance of disease outbreak is much higher. One of the major increases in the Neolithic is

violence. Rising populations, land grabbing, cultural clashes, disease and famine are all causes of social pressures. Near the start of the Neolithic in Europe, violence reaches such heights that large groups of people were massacred. The Talheim death pit found in Germany held the remains of men, women and children. We see this kind of violence across the Neolithic world. Your chance of being killed violently today, including those areas of the world that are unfortunately unstable or in a state of warfare, is about 3%. In the early Neolithic in some regions, regardless of age or sex, it could be as high as 33%. All in all, Neolithic farmers fare worse than the Mesolithic hunters who preceded them. But the agricultural revolution does lay the groundwork for the next

several thousand years of our history, leading to the rise of urban living and increasingly complex forms of social organization. At the end of the Pleistocene period, the human population hovers at around six million. It is largely thanks to the advent of farming, that it stands at over eight billion today. The period of time, now known as the Stone Age, did not end all at once. With the advent of urban civilizations and metalworking, human history moves into what we call the Bronze Age. This occurred at different times in different places. Around 3,000 BC, for example, while Neolithic communities in Britain are building the stone circle at Avebury, what we think of as ancient Egypt, complete with mummies, pharaohs and hieroglyphics has already begun.

The Stone Age begins to come to an end from just under 9,000 years ago when we see the first copper tools being made from naturally occurring copper metal, sometimes known as a native metal. Like farming, this new technology would take time to reach all parts of the occupied world, and some regions would never really adopt it with the same enthusiasm as others. The Maya, for example, didn't use metal for tools or weapons, it was only used for jewelry and ornamentation. This is probably because they had access to the sharpest material on the earth, obsidian. Unlike the Neolithic that had huge cultural and technological and societal change, the Bronze Age perhaps was more of a change that was focused primarily around technology.

The Stone Age can feel very distant from our 21st century lives. We have no written records of the people who lived through this millennia-spanning sweep of human history, and so we rely on fragmentary archaeology. People's names and the details of their lives are lost to us in a way that is not true for later periods. Our Paleolithic ancestors shared the planet with species of humans and animals that no longer even exist, Neanderthals and Denisovans, saber-tooth tigers, and woolly mammoths. Yet there is much that is familiar about the people who live through the Stone Age. It is the epoch when the behaviour that marks us out as a distinctive species emerged, our ability to speak, to make and refine complex tools,

to domesticate crops and animals, to make art, and to live in increasingly complex societies. As human beings, we would be nothing without the Stone Age. And when we can find moments of kinship with our distant predecessors, there are remarkable similarities. The connection to our ancestors who were painting the art on those cave walls tens of thousands of years ago is clearly incredibly distant. And I'm not a particularly spiritual person.

I'm a scientist. But I can go into a cave site and see the outline of a hand on a wall that's been sprayed with red ochre, perhaps through a bone or straight out of someone's mouth over 20,000 years ago. And I might have their bones in a box somewhere, perhaps without knowing. But with that spray-painted hand, I can see the outline of their skin. I can get a sense in the same conditions that they were in deep underground in a cold, dark cave, as they made this impression on the wall. And that's perhaps one of the few times,

that you can feel that tingle on the back of your neck, those hairs standing up, when you can see the outline, not the bones, but the outlines of a person that you could recognize in the street from 20,000 years ago that have made a mark in much about the same way that we will have. That's something that clearly connects us over tens of thousands of years.

Next time we'll bring you the Silk Roads. And everywhere is about how, you rebuild the Silk Roads and those connections, partly because it speaks of past glories, but there is something also more real about how do people cooperate. And that language of religion, of different ethnicities, of trade, everybody's a winner, because this is something that is our great legacy to the world. So, you know, I think there's lots of ways in which that history is alive and well and really important to tap into today, to understand it today. That's next time.