The archaeological record of the Neolithic in Scandinavia is similar to that in Britain: farming arrives some 6,000 years ago, and then there’s at least a millennium where farming communities and hunter-gatherer groups are co-existing in the broad landscape. Pontus and his colleagues managed to extract and sequence DNA from four individuals who had

Among those fragmentary remains, bits of skull are disproportionately represented. And although the skull cups from Gough’s Cave are unusual – they are not unique. There are at least three other sites where crania seem to have been modified for use as cups. Most are from France, dating from very close to the peak of the last Ice Age, but some appea

In historical times, people who died suddenly or were murdered could be buried in strange ways – prone, or with rocks on their chests, or mutilated – to prevent them ‘coming back’.

During interglacials, when the ice had melted away, the sea level rose, cutting off Britain. It was during the transitions – in and out of glaciations – when this landscape was both accessible and attractive to large herbivores and the humans that hunted them. Two hundred and thirty thousand years ago, then, the landscape of Britain was reachable –

‘Roughly where we’re standing, just to the south of the hillfort itself, there was a group of Bronze Age barrows. They were later reused for Saxon burials – that’s fairly common.’ This echoed that reuse of Neolithic tombs in the Bronze Age. ‘It seems to be about more recent incomers wanting to establish their right to the land,’ muses Adrian. Linki

The timber halls under the mounds were clearly once huge buildings, even by modern standards. ‘Do you think it’s significant that this was a time when people were becoming more settled in the landscape?’ I asked him. ‘Yes, I do,’ he replied. ‘And society is changing – they’re forming larger, more complex communities, and one of the ways in which th

One of the most obvious and undeniable signs of interpersonal violence, ancient or modern, is a weapon or projectile lodged in a body. Today we’d look for a bullet tearing through flesh. In the Stone Age, we look for stone arrowheads and spearheads lodged in ancient bones. The earliest examples in Europe come from two sites in Italy, around 13,000

At Wetwang Slack, careful digging and dating allowed the sequence of burials in the cemetery to be disentangled. Clusters formed around primary interments – typically, an older woman buried with beads would be the ‘founder figure’ – her grave forming a focus for subsequent burials of more women, with or without beads. Those gendered clusters also m

Archaeologists look for evidence of sophisticated tool-making – creating tools which require several steps and forward-planning in their manufacture. The earliest stone tools of any sort go back over 3 million years ago and are very crude – pebbles are bashed together and useful flakes with sharp edges fly off.