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4000 and 2500 BC – we were late developers!
Neolithic means New Stone Age and it followed the
Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age when men first made
fire and the even more distant Paleolithic or Old
Stone Age, the time of woolly mammoths and cave
paintings.
It would have taken Neolithic farmers a whole day
to fell a massive oak from the primeval wildwood
with their stone axes but with just one big tree
removed, creating a hole in the dense canopy,
archaeological pollen evidence shows that rain and
wind erosion caused the collapse of the surrounding
trees. Stone Age farmers might also have cleared
woodland by burning or by ring barking - a brutal
technique also known as girdling which involves
stripping a ring of bark from the entire circumference
of the tree to kill it. But the evidence suggests that by
and large Neolithic farmers didn’t go in for whole
scale woodland clearance tending instead to fit
themselves to the existing lie of the land. Stonehenge
out on Salisbury Plain was a largely treeless area
whereas Neolithic Avebury was naturally woody.
For many years it was thought that Neolithic farmers
avoided the heavy clay soil and dense woodlands of
the English Midlands for being too tricky to tackle
with their primitive ploughs called ards. But in more
recent years rather spectacular finds from these areas
have disproved this theory. It appears that Stone Age
farmers adapted to the more difficult conditions by
establishing smaller and more isolated farms dotted
here and there in a make do and mend fashion rather
than the clustering pattern found elsewhere.
Sour Grapes
If it wasn’t for the activities of man almost all of
Britain would still be woodland of one kind or
another. When the glaciers finally retreated at the end
of the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago, pioneer native
trees - Scots pine, birch, willow and rowan colonized
the bare land. Later came the broad-leaved species -
lime and the mighty oak. These wildwoods reached
their peak about 6,000 years ago covering as much
as 90 per cent of the British landscape.
Julius Caesar described Britain as
“one horrible
forest”
but he was quite wrong for we now know that
most of the wildwood was already long gone by the
time the Romans started sniffing at our shores.
Perhaps, given the dismal failures of his invasions,
in 55 and 54 BC, it was the workman blaming his
tools. Sour (Mediterranean) grapes. The default setting
of the national consciousness is to picture ancient
Britain as a land of endless enchanted forests but it is
a fantasy, like my wooden Roman bridge. For it turns
out that the axes have been ringing in our woodlands
for a very long time.
The Neolithic Revolution
Somewhere between 11,500 and 5000 years ago
across the globe men began to plant and harvest crops
and to domesticate animals. The hunting and gathering
nomads became farmers settling in permanent
communities. This was the
Neolithic Revolution
,
which many historians consider to be the most
important turning point in the entire history of
mankind. In Britain the revolution happened between
Julius Caesar’s botched invasion