Age Of Ancestors - Ep: 2 | The World of Stonehenge | BBC Documentary

this is the story of how Britain came to be of her our land and its people who were forged over thousands of years of ancient history this Britain is a strange and alien world a world that contains the hidden story of our distant prehistoric past the occupation of Britain began with hunters battling for survival through the Ice Age it's fantastic after fourteen thousand years to get a glimpse of the way at least one individual was thinking and continued into a new age that came after the ice instead of hunting mammoths and reindeer in the snow he hunted red deer in the Wildwood no the journey continues [Applause] [Music] with the next chapter in our epic story nothing like this had ever been seen before in Britain the invention of farming and the massive social revolution that came with it a brave new world that shaped our land and the way we lived forever [Music] I'm going back 10,000 years to a wild and untamed Britain the ACH was over and a new britain had emerged blanketed with trees but older hazel and finally ork across the whole of our land perhaps no more than a few thousand nomadic hunters lived by drawing everything they needed from that landscape they had Flint for tools Red Deer provided meat antler for picks and harpoons and needles hides for shelters and clothes these people didn't just live close to nature they were part of nature 10,000 years ago Britain was still attached to mainland Europe as it had been throughout the Ice Age know though sea levels were rising and a new britain was emerging [Music] gradually Britain was becoming an island much of the land that had been home to nomadic hunters for thousands of years was disappearing beneath the waves here on the south coast just off the Isle of Wight was a relic of that ancient world evidence of people who lived here just as all this was becoming seen 10,000 years ago there was no a love wait it was part of the English mainland to the north and still joined to northern Europe and France to the south and all of that out there the Solent was dry land which should mean out there underneath the water are the relics of a lost world and of the people who lived on it it's a world that's being explored by archaeologist Gary mumble and I'm going to join her [Music] I'm about to go back to attained when rising sea levels were tunneling land into tidal marsh when Britain was an island in the making the site is eight thousand years old a time archaeologists call the Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age it's really happening a picture of mythic period that we're not getting from sites on land so when sea level was lower further back in time and we're finding the world preserved remains so it's actually the seal is gonna make it awkward for us it's what has preserved if it wasn't for the sea it wouldn't be there in a final diamond check five is ready for the water once this was home to a coastal community of hunter-gatherers living our way of life that had barely changed for thousands of years [Music] what's been discovered here is more than an ancient hunting camp it's the oldest boat building yard in the world and it contains fragile evidence of the sophistication of the people who once lived here it was I can stay down there for hours when it's like that so this piece of timber is how well it worked it's over 8,000 years old it's come up in association with other bits and pieces of one piece of timber in particular which we believe may be part of a log boat see those grooves haha they're clearly defined they are so that's woodworking that's not natural evolution no that's weird working that's obviously part of something for the grooves on the side so some years ago was working with us with a stone tool to create these grooves you don't as a general rule you just do and see organic material coming out of Mesolithic sites you get the stone tools but to see what those stone tools are being used for it's the other half of the equation it's pretty unique and very special [Music] the log boat is an extraordinary insight into the leaves are the hunters who once lived here [Music] Mesolithic life might have been nomadic but it was largely carried out around the shorelines of Britain's coasts and rivers the forested land of the interior was a dangerous forbidding world but all that was about to change and all because of these tiny grains of barley like the Solent boatbuilders these are around 8,000 years old but these aren't from the ale of wait these are from more than 2,000 miles away to the southeast what's now Syria this is evidence of a new way of living a world not of hunting but a farming when this technology arrived in Britain it would nudge us towards a whole new era in our history what we call the Neolithic the new Stone Age by producing food farming communities could provide for bigger families more children and that meant better chances of survival for the whole group instead of hunting the wild hares no farmers had new domesticated breeds of cattle and sheep instead of gathering wild nuts and berries farmers could grow most of what they needed from seed the Neolithic Revolution was to utterly change the way we thought about food and survival but it was much much more than that it was also too profoundly alter our sense of ourselves as human beings as part of the natural world in a sense as well as domesticating livestock we're also domesticating ourselves [Music] this revolution when it finally reached our shores would change everything let me change the land the things we eat let me change our relationship is time if you change our beliefs and the way we understand our place in the universe [Music] this change the jump to farming was the single greatest social revolution was ever been [Music] to try and understand what happened when the radical new world of agriculture collided with the ancient world of the hunter I'm leaving England behind and crossing the channel to France by five thousand BC Neolithic culture was spreading into Western Europe for the hunting communities of northern France the new ways must have been completely baffling in Brittany is a unique set of monuments lying upon line of ancient standing stools [Music] these weren't erected by Neolithic farmers but by Mesolithic hunters just as the first farmers started appearing on the doorstep this place is just extraordinary I've known about it for years I've seen photographs of it countless times but this is my first visit and the impact of the stones is just breathtaking everywhere you look there's more of them but in every direction line after line of them you look at any one of them there were at least tens of tons some of them because if they were even more [Music] they completely dominate the landscape everybody you Luke we use extraordinary to describe a lot of things but a place like this really deserves the work what we're looking at is the result of a collision not just of cultures but two completely different belief systems all of this might be the result of a monumental tipping point in human history [Music] the hunters hold the stones into place to demonstrate their strength in the face of people they didn't understand but theirs was the old world in just a few hundred years Neolithic culture took over and many of these great standing stones became building material for something new Neolithic stone tombs archaeologists search Kazon has studied them for over 20 years is there a connection between the change from lines of stones to tombs like this and the change to farming yes it is probably linked with these new processes new economy this food nearly thick where life of animals life of plants are very important inside this life cycle inside one two excavated by Serge this decisive fork in history is marked by some remarkable rock art so these these are the old-style Mesolithic hunting weapons almost like a primitive boomerang uses to kill birds in Turkey okay so this is the old world that email very phallic yes exactly one carving in particular brings it all home we can observe now carvings another throwing stick yes the same shape the same weapon the same reason Tatian and and we have the Polish axe from the Neolithic period with his handle so this triangular shape yes exactly so you put the new technology of the axe on top of and even even cutting into the old world of the rooster so isn't this is almost the moment or it's depicting the moment when the old world and the new world collide and after that collision the new world is dominant over they all exactly we may never fully understand a site like carnac we might never hear what those hunters were trying to see with the stones but to me apart from anything else they are a statement of defiance for saying to the farmers come in bring your crops bring your animals but be aware that we are here that we've always been here we're part of this landscape and we belong to it they're saying we may not last forever our we have life may not last forever but we will be remembered not just for now but for all time [Music] the age of the Mesolithic was coming to an end by 4500 BC the Neolithic Revolution had conquered almost all of Europe but around here it came to halt because of that farming might have swept across the landmass of Europe but the last few watery miles presented a different challenge it would take hundreds of years but that final leap across the channel and interpreting was inevitable [Music] exactly how the new Stone Age came to Britain and what the local hunters made of it remains one of the greatest mysteries in all of our prehistory the first farmers must have come to Britain by boat bringing the family's domestic cattle and green these were pioneers undertaking a perilous journey to a new and unknown land and direct evidence of some of those first farmers can be found here in Kent [Music] wait you see what's up here [Music] nothing like this had ever been seen before in Britain this is one of the very air list stone tombs this is Neolithic behavior the people who built this what amongst the first to come and farm our land and I've talking about 6,000 years ago today the rich soil of Kent is still praying farming land and together with its proximity to mainland Europe you can see the attraction for the earliest farmers coming over course you have to remember six thousand years ago when the first people arrived with intention of farming here all of that would have been woodland so first of all they had to clear the trees cut them down burn them down and then they had to build the homesteads you can only imagine what the local hunters thought unlike the Mesolithic hunters who hugged the coastline and river valleys the first farmers began to break into the interior of Britain and what they find was a wild and wooded place for thousands of years forests of oak and birch had grown blanketing the landscape in green this was home to red deer and elk the undergrowth bears and wild pig but this wild and ancient Britain was about to be transformed forever the new farmers work technologists this wasn't living off the land like the Mesolithic hunters but shaping it adapting it making it work for them these people weren't simply fitting into the world alongside nature they were going to rule over it incredibly some of those pioneers the very mothers and fathers of this brave new world have survived [Music] around 17 individuals were in tared in that neolithic tomb in kent and these are the bones of just a few of them but a whole age range represented amongst the dead these pelvis bones here this is a baby and an older child through two older people and old people in the ethic terms is somebody my age somebody in their 40s would be pensionable and we often talk about the Neolithic Revolution and the farming revolution and the effect it had on on Britain and on the landscape but what you also see here you have to remember all the time are real people this is part of a man's skull these individuals are part of the most profoundly affecting living experiment that's ever been attempted they trust our future to planting a few seeds in the spring in the hope of a harvest in the autumn they keep some animals in the hope that that meat will be enough to sustain them and the families it's a gamble so or else you might want to imagine about this man you certainly brave however people took up the new ways it's no thought that Neolithic culture in some form swept across the whole of Britain in just a few generations but with just a few fragments of evidence from 6,000 years ago exactly how it all began might forever remain a mystery what's more across the whole of Britain as precious little evidence of how those early farmers actually lived which is why I'm leaving our shores yet again headed this time for Ireland [Music] [Music] welcome to the West of Ireland one of the wildest most spectacular landscapes I've ever seen [Music] [Music] [Music] in Britain archaeologists have only discovered fragments of early farming but here something's been preserved on a truly massive scale what's special about this place is the ground this landscape is blanketed in peat bog slowly decaying vegetation that builds up layer upon layer it takes thousands of years but what's drawn me here isn't the bog itself but what's hidden beneath it as much as four meters beneath my feet here just drive it in oh it's like a knife through butter archaeologist Seamus coal-fueled has been probing this bog with simple metal rods for over 40 years so just about here and put it in straight vertical yep he's using them to map ancient stone walls made by the Neolithic farmers who once lived here so that's the old ground surface coming on and then and you start to come up behind you you can hear the turret install now yes it's beginning to look like it some reason listen to that again give it a yeah knock knock yes five and a half thousand years ago someone lifted a stone in place and now we're hearing it for the first time so how much have you found how extensive is the is the wall something over a hundred linear kilometers at this stage a hundred kilometers yeah yeah I'm joking that is jaw-dropping the scale of that yes it's just sitting there under the Barger as it was by probing every inch of this land Sheamus and his teams of helpers have revealed far more than some buried walls [Music] but the fund is the biggest Neolithic field system in the entire world cattle enclosures that stretch almost as far as the eye can see what of the fuels for it's a daring economy they have to wean the calves from the milks cows they have to separate the dry stock from the milking animals their Arthur's Harold management is what's involved Lee's Sudanese we need lots of separate areas to keep bull calves and milking cows and all the rice yes typically in Ireland the weather torrents foal but I'm determined to uncover some of this wall for myself and here on the bog there's only one way to do it clean the blade is this old disused locally famous bottle and this that's 90% water at the moment but it dries out and that's the fuel we use all the time this is all for you all I can say don't give up the day job you're right look there it is look at that that is the wall that's amazing look come here look at this look that's the top of a wall that's about a meter high extends down of a meter beneath my feet no the Sun has risen and set two million times since these stones last saw the light of day the last hands to touch these before mine mother's on a Neolithic farmer five and a half thousand years ago no even on a full day like today and this is truly full the state of these the touch of these makes it worthwhile doesn't it just about does it does yes it still does amazing the cager field structures are a hidden wonder of the world but the walls aren't the only secret because the feet itself can reveal just what this world was like five and a half thousand years ago and even what was being farmed the piece is preserving the record of human activity vegetation etc through time so it is this it is like a history book of thousands of years by studying pollen grains preserved in the peat Michael O'Connell can identify fort was growing in the ancient landscape this particular pollen grain comes from pine the pine was the dominant tree in kg fields before farmers came at the early part of the Neolithic the pollen totally changed from being tree pollen dominated to being herb and grass dominated the change to grassland pollen shows that the trees were cut down and replaced with pasture for grazing cattle [Music] but in amongst the grassland pollen michael has made an even more startling discovery we were really excited about the about these results this particular sample has quite a number of cereal pollen and of course this is really important because it shows week and maybe also barley were grown so this was a really interesting and significant find [Music] cereals and domestic animals transformed society but there was also a third Neolithic invention pottery together all fee created a completely new diet a feature of Neolithic life studied by Jackie wood this is actually just wait let's just boil right I know the new thing for the Neolithic some bread of life is just fat right very that's all flavor some now this is a bit of prehistoric stood still cooking okay yeah absolutely bottoms big thing a Neolithic bread and butter what could be more quintessentially British I'll tell you what absolutely everything is so substantial have indeed much of anything would you really sticks to your ribs everything else the new food might have seemed good but human remains show evidence of farmers being less healthy than hunters with the diet of fresh fish and red deer no more I beg of you and there was another price to pay this is actually a real Quinn this is the genuine article this is the genuine article so if we put some sort of green on first this is some thousand years old that's right so what's the action just spread down but that sound the sound of the Stone Age basically I'm doing this for a minute but if you were if you were to put two what clickless you know on a daily basis is what kind of tall physical tall do you think this kind of work hard on people we can actually see that it did have a toe because in the archaeology they actually find some skeletons where the actual parts of the vertebrae actually quite worn because of repeatedly doing this grinding but you need to grind for a good hour every day to make enough bread for a family every day so the daily grind will be wasted Lee despite all the individual hardships abroad it was the sheer productivity of farming that made it irresistible as a survival strategy this is where our working lives began invented by the first farmers of the Neolithic this was a point of no return farming was productive so people could have more children and open up more land the population increased quickly came a deal when they couldn't go back to hunting even if they wanted to because there are simply too many people around and it wasn't just the daily grind this new-age would usher in the idea of land ownership and conflict the neolithic would completely change how we thought about ourselves in this life and the next the Neolithic Revolution changed our mindset not only towards work but the idea of the land and our relationship to it it changed our beliefs and evidence of these new beliefs can be found in massive stone tombs some of which mark our countryside even today one of the most impressive is in Wiltshire this great long mound was created by taking thousands of tons of choc rubble from ditches on either side some of the stones we forty tons and they were hauled here from as much as a mile away this is the work of a whole community not just one family and its people for whom the creation of this mattered as much or more than anything else they were doing and these were busy farmers this isn't just a tomb this isn't simply about remembering a loved one this is about creating an entire world one built by the community of the living for the community of the Dead and which you see what's inside about 40 people were buried in here around 3600 BC over a period of maybe just 25 years or so what we think happened was when someone died if it was deemed appropriate that they become part of this place then the body would be laid out maybe nearby maybe even in here in the passageway and then the the natural process of decomposition would begin and animals and birds would would remove the flesh over a period of time they were they weren't laid out as individuals as intact skeletons you would have a pail of skulls then a separate neat pile of vertebrae and another pail of long bones and that was important because what's going on is a process by which the the loved ones ceased to be just individuals members of the community they become part of one collect of presence the ancestors strange little tombs like this well not sealed but left open in some ways they were more akin to temples which you could enter to commune with the spirits of the dead and imagine what that felt like for people who truly believed that their loved ones as well as the ancient dead were somehow in here that their will was in here and that they were watching them and that they were aware so you would come in here with great reverence and great respect with the hairs going up on the back of your neck and all over your body as you wondered what would happen next but these great structures also had an earthly function all around us is rich and fertile farmland highly valued by building this here the people are laying claim to it this long bar who forged a permanent link between the community their ancestors and the fields they had farmed for generations this is about the arrival of something new in our history the concept of ownership but the notion of ownership the idea that a place a territory belongs to the tribe and their ancestors was to have consequences [Music] up on top of this hill is the site of one of the earliest examples of a great watershed in British history armed conflict [Music] [Applause] [Music] look at that for a view that's the Severn Valley down there over there ghostly in the mist the Malvern Hills over in that direction the Forest of Dean beyond that the Black Mountains and onwards into Wales that's modern-day Gloucester down there but of course five and a half thousand years ago that landscape would have been predominantly woodland with the occasional farmstead and cleared field and in a sense whoever controlled this high ground controlled the landscape below so if you wanted to lay claim to all that valuable land you had to take this the top of Crickley Hill and what's been found up here is testament to that look at the east he's a half a dozen Flint arrowheads and the from a collection of our own 450 complete arrowheads or fragments that were found scattered all across the top of Crickley Hill to my eye these are just the most beautiful things they're symmetrical so beautifully shaped look at the look at the profile of that look how fine it is how much effort has gone into taking off infinite numbers of tiny flakes to produce that tear sheep idle head but as well as appreciating the beauty of them and some of these could be could be jewelry as well as appreciating all of that you have to appreciate that this is also evidence of the cruel intention to kill back at the Natural History Museum there's direct evidence of this violent world look at this pure Chapman the condition of his teeth suggests that he died probably and he's mid-twenties and older than that and he died because someone smashed his skull in with a blunt object maybe a stone axe or a stone hammer and the wound was inflicted with such force that it caused this fracture line to read the right round to the other side of his skull he would have been killed instantly and the violence at that time wasn't limited to the man this is a woman's skull and there's a wound here towards the front then much easier to see there's another dimpled wouldn't to the back of her head but she survived the attack that caused these wounds we know she survived because she lived long enough for the winds to heal over and she also lived long enough to have lost all of her teeth by the time she finally gave up the ghost what we can say about this is really quite shocking it means that if you lived in those first centuries of the Neolithic at least between 4000 and 3000 BC people would have known about they would have witnessed and they might even have experienced extreme physical violence there was a lot of a boat in just a few hundred years the population of Britain exploded from just a few thousand hunters to perhaps 100,000 farmers as contact between groups became more frequent people needed to find new ways of coming to terms with him without always killing one another they also had to lay the foundations of a kind of local politics as well it was as if they were saying it's not enough just to change the way we live the way we work we'll have to invent society as well [Music] [Applause] this meat cooperate to get along gave birth to monuments on a truly grand scale the very act of hundreds or even thousands of people collaborating would have boned Neolithic communities together [Music] the earthworms they created are so vast they remain etched into our landscape even today despite the ravages of thousands of years of wind and rain one of those giant monuments can be found here in Wiltshire the trouble is it's so big that up close you can't even see it [Music] I'm right in the middle of something archaeologists call a cursus this one is 30 kilometers long and 150 metres wide some are even bigger to be honest you could be forgiven for walking right past it without even noticing down there is the remains of a ditch it's very shallow no but it stretches almost as far as the eye can see it's barely perceptible but in its original form it would have been quite distinct chalky white soil against the green of the grass and it would have marked out the interior as a very long thin laws and shape these were originally called Costa seas because they were thought to have been the remains of Roman racetracks but of course we now know that they're much much older this thing was built by Neolithic farmers 3,500 BC today the only way to really get a sense of the shape of monuments like this is from the air even from up here it's not that easy to see but after a while you get your eye in and you begin to see what it is you're supposed to be looking at from one end the curses can be seen cutting through a bank of trees almost like a gigantic runway disappearing off into the distance [Music] but you stop with no more than anything is the scale of the thing and what hits you is the level of air front that was involved not to mention the sheer determination of course the big question is what does this sheep symbolize is it a boundary is a processional way is even a an aural vessel designed to contain the dead perhaps it's a bit of all of those things but the simple truth is we don't know but there are other monuments we do know more about massive earthworks known as cause weed enclosures and there's one three concentric circles like three necklaces looked around the hill right in there these monuments our meeting points where people came for large gatherings perhaps at special times of the year [Music] for archaeologist Alistair petal they reveal the beginning of Stone Age Society closing closures are very exciting places and all sorts of things go on that so they could find a know settle disputes or or meet husbands and wives married people off I think all these things sort of would have gone on and do we have the the artifacts to have the things left behind we have lots of artifacts that's one of the big things about these sites they're rich in material and we have lots of artifacts so here we've got the top of the skull and the whole towards the front edge of it's called of a domesticated cow box so how all doesn't that skull I left over five and a half thousand years that's a hugely significant find for me to see something like that you know that's that's so early in this in the story of farming the thought that that beast was walking the ground here when this was a shining white yes looking at over woodland met its fate perhaps its sacrifice is probably eaten there we can look at the top view and again is this of a over of a comparable age to the Box born this is the same age so we're looking at about five and a half thousand years old it's so rattling of everything that the Neolithic is abode you know the domesticated animals then use ceramic the you know the new foods that were that were made possible because of this I keep thinking of a time capsule is this a conscious effort for people to remember we have they came from how far we've come I I think it is I think memory is very important and coming to terms with a huge coming coming to terms with a really big change in in existence which has been played out of these opening centuries of the Neolithic [Music] the early monuments of the new Stone Age are about people coming to terms with a whole new world not only with each other but the land itself and their place within it this place encapsulate s-- or these people who lived in britain these early farmers were trying to work out and to understand and discoveries made here go some way towards summing it all up look at this this is the anklebone of a domesticated cow it was found buried within the ditch that encircles the top most innermost part of this hill that's where all the pottery was found as well incidentally what it represents is the world that the farmers were trying to create a safe domesticated controllable world by contrast look at this one this is the anklebone of a wild coat an undomesticated animal you can see right away how much bigger it is than the point from the domesticated cave no this wasn't phoned up here instead this was buried right at the base of the hill down there out there is the dangerous world the wild world the uncontrolled undomesticated world and to me there's something a little bit sad about that because it's the wild world that the old way of life of the hunters was so in tune with and yet it was that world that the farmers were trying to be separate from to cut themselves off from here around three thousand eight hundred years bc the farmers were trying to make sense of all of that in their own minds just where was the boundary between the wild and the domestic we had the brave new world that they'd created actually brought them it's as though they realized that no they had made their bed and that they would have to lie in it and to some extent so must we next time my journey continues of course what everybody's waiting for is the sunrise as I discovered a whole new age which one can I have a team of elite travelers to actually feel it working it'd be like once the year I wanted to feel it no that's a bit good vast cosmic constructions I see why your daughter this place open to the public driver and the very invention of heaven itself when some people died they ought to be sent to a new place a different place not down into the earth but up into the sky [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: BBC Documentary

Views: 1,582,117

Rating: 4.7994137 out of 5

Keywords: bbc documentary, documentary bbc, bbc, world of stonehenge tv series, world of stonehenge, stonehenge documentary, neil oliver documentary, neil oliver history of ancient britain, neil oliver stonehenge

Id: FFo3AB2fzTE

Length: 51min 48sec (3108 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 11 2018