What Happened To Britain's Last Hunter-Gatherers? Prehistoric Europe Documentary

this is an hour-long deep dive into ancient prehistoric Europe if you'd like to see me making shorter historical videos go subscribe to my second channel where I'm currently uploading every single week the French province of Brittany has always had a unique history jutting out as it does into the cold Atlantic seafarers have called these shores home for almost as long as people have used boats from fleets of Celtic Finnish I fighting against the power of Rome to breath on ik refugees crossing over the waters from war-torn post Roman Britain to Scandinavian newcomers claiming the region for their own our story however takes us much further inland and much further into the past to the rugged center and the southern coasts of this storied Peninsula for there astride marshland and forest sits one of the most impressive megalithic monuments in all of Europe like similar but much later massive sites in Britain such as Avebury the only stone circle to contain a village and a local pub within its henge Carnac can only truly be appreciated from the air home to as many as 3000 standing stones this is a monumental area added to and remoulded down the long millennia since its initial construction long before Rome or the Celts even existed before metal had even been molded here for the first time this was a sacred landscape when they were first investigated during the 1700s the stones had initially been attributed to druids older legends suggested their origins as unfortunate Roman legionaries turned to stone by the wizard Merlin we know now thanks to radiocarbon dating that though the stones remained important down the centuries since their completion gaining new meaning for each new people that came into the area their origins are far older than the Roman or Celtic worlds possibly originating as early as around 5000 BC [Music] today this landscape remains one of the finest and most captivating examples of megalithic architecture found anywhere in the world the stones here began life as weathered granite outcroppings which once extensively covered the landscape moved into place over the span of generations by the people who lived here continuing to be remodeled and changed for thousands of years all the way into the Bronze Age at first glance this site may seem perfectly exemplary of the new world that took over here during the fifth millennium BC a revolutionary new lifestyle originating in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East by way of Anatolia steadily covering all of Europe from around 7,000 BC onwards a world based on farming crops and domesticated animals a way of life which could sustain much higher populations and verse gradually replaced the much less populous hunter-gatherer societies that held sway in Europe before eventually culminating in the likes of Stonehenge Newgrange and the Ring of Brodgar [Music] yet the story isn't as simple as this in the centuries immediately following 5000 BC Brittany was still very much populated by hunter-gatherers people who'd called this region home as far as they were concerned since the beginning of time and whilst the distinction between Mesolithic or middle Stone Age and Neolithic or new Stone Age isn't anywhere near as clear cut as Victorian writers may have assumed the material culture they left behind does suggests very different lifestyles one very much based within nature the other beginning to leave it behind for the first time debate still rages today as to the fate of those hunters who came before farming were they replaced or did they become part of this new world well here at carnac a few carvings may hint but at least some of these people's final fate within the dolmen of cocada a passage tomb still covered by its original can is a carving upon a standing stone reused in its construction this carving at least tentatively dated to around 4900 BC doesn't seem to have been made by Neolithic farmers but by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers hinting at this place beginning life as a shrine of the hunters maybe even a spiritual last bastion of the old world standing against the new we don't have to look too far away to see monumental architecture constructed by hunter-gatherers gobekli tepe being one famous example nor do we find a vacuum of artwork during the Mesolithic fine examples existing thousands of years back in the historical record if it was indeed Mesolithic hunters who erected the earliest stones at Carnac whether they had adopted agriculture or not they weren't as simple people however they may have been a desperate one perhaps driven to ask their gods for aid as news of this strange new world from the East approached [Music] of course the news could have been passed on by trader emissaries as Neolithic people arrived in France by around 5,000 BC around pas-de-calais [Music] perhaps heralding their approach by telling of monstrous animals magical seeds and enchanted artifacts coming their way and when they did come which surely they did did they come as pilgrims or as conquerors or somewhere in between avoiding conflict wherever they could was their site at Karnak in fact a transitional society with roots in both traditions will probably never know but in just a few hundred years agriculture domesticated animals along with pottery permanent settlements and megalithic constructions took over changing everything in northern Europe [Music] the way our ancestors viewed themselves the world around them and their place within it curiously the English Channel seems to have halted the advance of this new culture for a time but soon enough it would begin its advance again we know that Neolithic people from here would soon head into Britain where of course debate rages as to the exact nature of the Neolithic arrival in both Brittany and in Britain we must ask what happened to the hunter-gatherers some of the last in all of Europe [Music] this video is sponsored by Magellan TV a brand new educational streaming service with over 2000 documentaries to watch on all manner of different subjects Magellan's producers and curators have brought together an astounding collection of documentaries on history science nature culture and geography these include films series and exclusive playlists you can't find anywhere else like Netflix this is a streaming service but made just for documentary lovers and knowledge seekers you can watch Magellan anywhere at anytime on any device directly through the high quality app which also offers a wide selection of content in 4k had no extra costs there are no ads or limited access at any time and the best part new documentaries are added on a weekly basis there are loads of great documentaries to choose from in Magellan's library with a huge amount dedicated to ancient history alone as many of you know one of my favorite eros is the early Middle Ages so I've been really enjoying this three-part series on the Normans those of you who head on over to Magellan tv.com forward slash history time or use my link in the description below we'll get a free trial so what are you waiting for head on over and get yourself some free knowledge [Music] evidence of the Mesolithic world or middle Stone Age survives today only as fragments but it does survive nonetheless like the people the archaeological record hints at who lived extremely difficult lives in comparison to the present day it often does so against the arts in the form of items tools food evidence and less often human remains it's been so long since these people lived so long that the vast majority of evidence for their lives simply hasn't survived especially as newer settlements build and rebuild over pre-existing whomps in particularly habitable areas for the most part we have to look to peripheral land to get our evidence places left unchanged for thousands upon thousands of years that were never consumed by modern architecture or towns due to their marginal nature sites like stark are in Yorkshire Goths cave and aveline's hole in Somerset cram and and the Hebrides in Scotland and mounts and L in Ireland the people who lived at these sites relied entirely on the wild animals and plants that lived around them just like they had done for hundreds of thousands of years living within nature not outside of it like everyone after the Neolithic farmers and unlike later people they lived entirely at nature's whim having no control over adverse climatic conditions bad food supply and harsh winters their very existence depended on their ability to maintain themselves and their connection with the natural environment which they knew intimately [Music] in the years after the last ice age these descendants of mammoth hunters found themselves living in a gradually changing landscape known as the boreal from around 8800 to 5800 PC a warmer drier period than they had ever experienced before which allowed a huge range of specialisms to arise in this new world of birch older hazel and finally oak woodland not too dissimilar to pockets that still exist today [Music] Mesolithic people were still nomadic and they were still hunter-gatherers but there is evidence to suggest that they were also much more settled when people had been in this part of the world for a very long time certainly since the last ice age and arguably ever in this new climate many people would have lived and died within roughly the same area rather than traversing the immense distances traveled by their predecessors instead of mammoths and reindeer on the open Tundra these people hunted red deer and/or rock in the wild would roughly speaking though of course there is a huge amount of overlap with prehistoric categorizations Mesolithic Britain spanned some 5000 years Mesolithic britain may have been populated by less than 5,000 people with the highest estimates standing at a meager 20 thousand compared to the 65 million people who call britain home today this was a very spare sleep opulent place apart from your own tribe you may never see another soul there is some evidence to suggest that at first Mesolithic people preferred to stay on coastlines and adjacent river valleys not often penetrating further inland into the Wildwood perhaps beginning to put down roots in these regions but as evidence is so scarce we can't really be sure of course there is a reason we don't find remains these people seem to have practiced X Carnation rather than burial leaving their people out in the open it is only at miraculously untouched sites such as in caves in the men dip hills of Somerset that we find corpses left in funerary contexts unfortunately many of these sites were simply discovered too early for meaningful conclusions to be derived from them such as a mass grave of somewhere between 50 and 200 people discovered at a Villines hole in the last year's of the 18th century red ochre and perforated animal teeth suggested that the bodies may have been dressed for the afterlife hinting at a prehistoric Stone Age ceremonies unfortunately riven by war Britain during those years had other priorities and much of the collection tentatively dated to somewhere around eight thousand four hundred to eight thousand two hundred BC is now lost in 1903 however not far from aveline's hole another remarkable discovery was made luckily in a time when archaeological techniques had been honed and sharpened this was the discovery of cheddar man some of the oldest modern human remains ever found in Britain dated to around 7,000 100 BC finds like cheddar man are so rare that even footprints found in the sand at Formby point near the Mersey estuary and gold cliff on the severed dating to this long gone by time are carefully excavated by researchers by far the most important information however comes from the camp's once inhabited by these people the earliest of which are found at Thatcher in the Kennett Valley stark are in Yorkshire and crammed and near Edinburgh with later examples - at sites such as Howick house in Northumbria the one major difference between these people and the animal world being their use of tools and perhaps even more crucially the harnessing of fire 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 but of course there was a trusted companion to domesticated dogs being found at Starke are the only domesticated animal to predate farming probably used a little like a sheepdog to herd and confuse hunted animals in the forest using Flint for tools deer antler for picks harpoons and needles animal hides for shelter and clothing all made with their bare hands by hours of back-breaking work this was an exhausting life though arguably not an unhealthy one hunter-gatherers by and large seeming to have a much more varied diet than Neolithic farmers the latter often relying heavily on grain for survival even during this early age there seems to have been an enduring attachment to particular places sometimes perhaps used for worship just like later pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe they didn't roam randomly knowing their home intimately mysterious postholes found in Mesolithic contexts even suggests some kind of ritual activity perhaps even for bears to the stone circles of later ages it's even been suggested that several Neolithic holy sites may have had Mesolithic antecedents in a situation not too dissimilar to early Christian churches being built atop pagan shrines in around 8000 BC on an ancient lakeside in what is now Yorkshire these antler bone heads dresses were placed into the water on purpose maybe in a tradition that would continue on and off all the way up to Roman Britain and beyond as a form of ritual deposition to separate them from the world of the living even at this early stage in British history water sites such as this may have been marked places certain Wells Springs waterfalls and lakes being seen as separate and apart from the everyday world a tradition that would continue well into the neolithic and beyond for example with the shrine of Sulis Minerva at bath and even the Ithorian legend of Excalibur being retrieved from the lady in the lake a tale with Iron Age antecedents [Music] many of these sites would later become part of early Christian tradition to [Music] Mesolithic people may have felt themselves much more a part of nature than we do today living in the modern world we cut ourselves off from it they were dependent on it in a spiritual sense as much as a practical one but as we know nature can be a very cruel master perhaps these headdresses found at Starke are were deposited in the water to placate nature spirits just like swords and high prestige items in later generations in terms of their day-to-day use before they were deposited ideas range from hunting shamanistic rituals display and a combination of all these perhaps the wearer thought themselves to become part beasts in an early form of religious tradition though no sculpted wood and very little stone from the Middle Stone Age survives in Britain we find incredible examples from elsewhere such as the Elks head of her tynin dated to between 8,000 and 9,000 years ago one of the best-known archaeological finds in Finland and the majestic shigera Idol of Russia made in around 9,500 BC by people living very similar lifestyles to those in Britain surely something similar must have been made on long nights around the campfire maybe even put into post holes left on the landscape [Music] from around 5800 to 4000 BC a warm wet period kicks in known as the Atlantic the number of hunter-gatherer sites in Ireland and Britain increases unique regional variances between cultures begin to become noticeable by this time in the last flourishing of the Middle Stone Age by this time most of mainland Europe had changed irrevocably with far more populous groups getting ever closer generation by generation 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 the underwater archaeologists moved in and one of the most important Mesolithic sites ever found in Britain began to be uncovered [Music] dating to around 6,000 BC timber architectural work here at boldness 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 however the plot thickened even further the DNA study uncovered evidence of wheat at the site a crop not thought to have arrived in Britain for thousands of years to come though the site remains controversial with many researchers arguing that the wheat is a later contamination it certainly hammers home an important point as soon as that small grain arrived on the island everything was to change [Music] in the centuries around 4000 BC a collection of new technologies would drastically alter life in Britain a Promethean revolution as significant to the human story as the harnessing of fire for this was the very moment our ancestors stepped outside of nature the basis of the modern world just as the Mesolithic had a distinctive toolkit recognizable by archaeologists honed over millions of years since human-like animals first used tools so too did the Neolithic for this is the time when a new culture definitively appears all over Britain along with fossilized wheat barley domesticated animals and pottery just as affluent hunter-gatherers had turned animals into servants in the Fertile Crescent agriculture would in turn domesticate the rest of the human race the neolithic wasn't like the industrial or agricultural revolutions of modern times it was much slower and more gradual largely imperceptible to those living through it whereas before almost all activity had been to do with gathering food this newfound surplus provided by the Neolithic package would be the basis and springboard for everything that would follow workers warriors priests power in time bureaucrats craftsmen builders economies of scale division of labor Trading economies social hierarchy intricate artwork and architecture temples towns cities and civilizations [Music] though productive for the group overall for the individual this societal change came with a price once the old skills of the forest are lost and a farming society adopted if crops fail with a far larger population now to feed a much more devastating collapse is on the cards also due to animal husbandry and generally living in a much dirtier environment than before due to population rice and the refuse that comes with it 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 goes on and increasingly only higher status individuals have regular access to meet the transition from a wild diet to domesticated food was the most critical shift in all of human history though to those who lived through it it happened in stops and starts gradually shifting along yet once the ball was rolling it was near impossible to get out of the trap [Music] the growing population itself would spur on more growth in turn until it was unstoppable a tipping point and knock-on cumulative effect putting more and more pressure on the environment and in turn pressuring younger males to push out on their own to create new settlements but a scale never seen before carrying their way of life wherever they went everything in world history that followed stemmed from these animals and plants [Music] agriculture has appeared spontaneously all over the world wherever and whenever plants susceptible to the molding hands of humans and the right climatic conditions exist from Peruvian Highlands to Chinese river valleys each creating a unique package to spread to surrounding hunter-gatherers to our story and that of much of the Eurasian world the most significant of these instances occurred in the Middle East around 12,000 years ago interestingly a site found on the Sea of Galilee named a Harlow - dated tentatively to around 23,000 years ago hints at a settlement reliant on fish and possibly grained with evidence for early sickle blades for harvesting being present though this remains a controversial site and it seems to have failed after a time nevertheless it does suggest a less clear-cut harnessing of Agriculture than ever thought before perhaps with many failed experiments along the way 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 the harsh Younger Dryas with other ideas put forward such as the feasting hypothesis with local strongmen wishing to amass enough food so they can 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 so-called founder crops appear Emmer and 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 to that which evolved independently in the Amazon rainforest on the far side of the world soon enough permanent towns and early cities began to develop at sites such as 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 by 7000 BC yet more Anatolian farmers left their homelands to cross into Europe their descendants wouldn't stop until they reached the English Channel living singular lifetimes as they did this onward March reminiscent of the long Jouret spoken off by influential 20th century historian Fernand Braudel would have been imperceptible to them though it remains pivotal to European history as we know it the Europe these people entered was a very different world to the one from which they stamped here they found a thickly forested continent seemingly with no end over a period of several thousand years much of this woodland would be hacked and burned down the farmers practicing slash-and-burn agriculture in many areas trees would never return but what happened to the people who already lived there well there is evidence of at least some hunter-gatherer groups seeming to adopt the new lifestyle of the farmers as is shown in Stephan mellows excellent video on southeastern Europe and in particular the lepenski vir culture in modern-day Serbia I highly recommend Stefan mellows excellent series of videos on this subject DNA evidence however tends to suggest that the lbk culture which spread along the river valleys of Central Europe to the West was a mostly demographic expansion the descendants of Anatolian farmers who had crossed over the waters some 1500 years before and since penetrated deep into the interior hacking and burning away the old forests [Music] this farming culture appearing alongside new genetic ancestry from the Aegean wherever it went [Music] however in other areas that can also be found a small component from the Western hunter-gatherers suggesting that is these new farmers were moving through the unfamiliar forests and grasslands of Europe they were also mixing with the local hunter-gatherer people it may simply be that the farmers were so numerous that even if continuous mixing occurred the hunters left a much smaller mark on the overall DNA profiles of Neolithic farming groups by the fifth millennium BC they were at the English Channel on a clear day the White Cliffs of Dover visible on the horizon [Music] in 1983 an amateur archaeologist in Ireland found an ancient Flint knife on the windswept southwestern coast initially he believed the find to be near lithic in origin but when official investigations began just over a decade later the site known as ferreters Cove in fact turned out to have been inhabited by Mesolithic hunters from as early as the 7th millennium BC in itself this wasn't particularly unusual many search sites being found in the area in 2012 however after animal remains at the site were analyzed the results sent shockwaves through the archaeological community carbon dated to around 4,000 350 BC and found in a Mesolithic context were cow and sheep bones not the native European or rock a far larger still wild beast destined to become extinct but a smaller animal descended from the Oryx of the Middle East long since domesticated thousands of years before this could mean only one thing Neolithic farmers or at least products of their lifestyle were in Ireland hundreds of years earlier than previously thought and astonishingly found within a hunter-gatherer camp with these bones the result of a wide-ranging sea voyage from the continent perhaps gifts from the lands beyond the sea or had they been taken in a raid upon a Neolithic settlement we simply don't know but Faris's Cove isn't alone three other late Mesolithic sites on the coasts of Britain and Ireland have been found to contain the bones of domesticated animals is this evidence of a trade network with links to the continent or simply hunter-gatherers doing what they'd always done but this time hunting the new animals brought in by incoming farmers ranging far and wide due to population congestion and a culture of patrilineal inheritance in mainland Europe we can't be sure but within a few hundred years hunter/gatherer sites here and all over Britain and Ireland all but disappear replaced by those of the farmers this region of Southern Ireland in particular is covered by a vast landscape of early Neolithic farmland known as the Jade fields found in peat bogs the nature of the transition from Mesolithic to Neolithic Britain has been subject to intense debate for many decades until the 1960s it was usually seen as the result of an influx of new people from the continents who then because of the Neolithic package soon out bred the hunters taking over the land and replacing them [Music] by the 1970s however this approach was largely rejected as too simplistic of you a new hypothesis was suggested one that argued for late Mesolithic hunter-gatherer communities perhaps in contact with their continental neighbors adopting the Neolithic package on their own voluntarily which then spread across the islands via already existing systems of social connectivity more recently still in part due to new DNA evidence uncovered over the last decade the argument has shifted yet again [Music] on the continent many mass graves are found which date to the Neolithic period but the question remains with ease the result of internal conflicts within the farmer societies though we do have evidence of violence within hunter-gatherer societies - particularly during the later 5th millennium BC [Music] in a world of defined boundaries with competition for commodities such as fishing grounds or animal migration camps antlers weren't just fashioned into tools but weapons of war to trespass into another's land at your own risk particularly during leaner times 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 to this you bow found in peat in the Somerset Levels was probably used mostly for hunting though in the right hands this would be a highly efficient killing machine by the mid 50 C the Danube e'en Neolithic and the car deal where Neolithic had been reaching their collective tendrils towards Britain for many centuries each having taken different routes into Europe from Anatolia these newcomers weren't by any means unified people each small clan probably being independent from the next when they eventually met in what is now modern-day France some of these groups had been apart culturally from one another for thousands of years potentially being just as hostile to each other if not more as they were against Mesolithic hunters this was a frontier zone of disparate tribes of mixing and merging cultural traditions with diverse geographical origins it seems reasonable to assume that for hunter-gatherers in Britain during the later centuries of the 5th millennium BC there would have been at least sporadic contact with the lands beyond the sea maybe with just certain intrepid individuals becoming traders or emissaries between groups this decorated Oak timber found at MIDI in North Wales may be evidence of Mesolithic people emulating designs found engraved on stones now incorporated into megalithic tombs in Brittany [Music] the Mesolithic world on the cusp of the Neolithic is a complex and fascinating period the last flourishing of ancient Europe people worked bone and wood sometimes with impressive skill even constructing monumental architecture such as this vast series of stone enclosures in Finland dating to the 4th millennium BC known as the Giants churches these sites as many as 200 existing in some form or another are thought to have been built by hunter-gatherers on the cusp of adopting farming techniques there are many theories about these sites but for the most part they remained a mystery it's been suggested that the individual lives of early Neolithic societies in Britain and Ireland don't seem to have been altogether different from their Mesolithic forebears the cumulative effect and populous nests of the latter group creating change over generations rather than singular lifetimes perhaps overlapping and washing against each other with farmers eventually out breeding the hunters with no set cutoff between the two lifestyles once they came into contact with one another nevertheless in the centuries between 4200 and 3800 BC Britain would be irrevocably changed forever year by year more of the old forest was cut back to make room for cultivated land as new food strategies arrived from the continent [Music] archaeologists like Alison Sheraton talk of a number of different strands of Neela tha's ation in Britain taking place at roughly the same time in various different regions this series of megalithic tombs dating to around 4,100 BC but cold room in Kent is one early example perhaps evidence of farmers jumping over the channel at the closest point maybe originating in the paris basin yet at the same time far to the north they were in what is now scotland constructing vast long houses along with their cultivated grains animals axes and pottery the first artificial material ever made in Britain made from mud fired in extremely hot kilns to create something entirely new each one sculpted by the hands of Mastercraft Spiegel the potter's wheel not having been invented yet [Music] experts like Sheridan look at pottery in particular to decipher the origins of particular groups most of the examples found in Britain hint that a fully formed technology already harnessed for millennia hunter-gatherers had always used birch or wood instead of pottery which they had no particular need for yet likewise today we have no need of mobile phones but once you start using one you don't go back [Music] arguably more so than any of the other new innovations coming into Britain it was pottery that opened Pandora's Box allowing humans to step outside of the natural world by storing their food for leaner times [Music] many other sites were settled by incoming farmers during this early period the West of Ireland being one area perhaps settled by people moving out of Brittany to head into Spain - the axe heads here being extremely well made suggesting a rich and prosperous people neolithic settlement in britain is unusual seeming very spread out and random in places on Orkney for example there is some evidence in the form of a mainland European vole not found anywhere else in Britain that the islands may have been settled directly from the continent perhaps these groups had been pushed out by demographic pressure and sought to avoid pre-existing settlements to find uninhabited land further north other settlements seem to have come fully formed from the Rhine into what is now lowland Scotland building vast long houses there yet they didn't all survive suffering from collapse after a few centuries just like their lbk forebears on the continent the first few centuries of Britain's Neolithic era were messy and chaotic a frontier society of people seeking new beginnings though it may be that hunters and farmers only tended to meet in peripheral inland areas at first the farmers mostly living by the sea inland sites do tend to contain both Mesolithic and Neolithic material maybe with the use of plants and animals limited in certain areas new kinds of hybrid communities of hunters and farmers existed for a time soon enough however all this was to change early Neolithic builders beginning to construct not just settlements but in time great tract ways known as cursus monuments rudimentary fortifications Flint mining on a vast scale and megalithic architecture [Music] it is to these places perhaps with their roots lying in the Iberian Peninsula several hundred years before mass tombs such as at cold room in Kent containing the last burial places of these farmers that we can now look for evidence in the last couple of decades a groundbreaking paradigm shift almost on the level of the radiocarbon revolution has been taking place in the field of archaeology allowing researchers an entirely new window into looking at the prehistoric past DNA evidence though only a handful of individuals have so far been tested we can arrive at a picture of at least a small section of Neolithic Society at the passage tomb of ballina Hattie in County Down Ireland for example several individuals seemed to have predominantly Near Eastern DNA with close affinities to groups found on the Iberian Peninsula and very little from the Western hunter-gatherers who inhabited Britain before them this is the same for many Neolithic remains that have been tested seeming to agree with the pottery evidence showing highly developed settler societies moving in convincing but hardly conclusive evidence of a complete takeover in life those buried in the tombs were presumably high status individuals not your average Neolithic farmer it's no wonder these people or at least their ancestors had been travelers they'd gambled and it had paid off [Music] the average Neolithic farmer may well have still used techniques of ax carnation to dispose of the dead leaving their bodies to the elements and verse wouldn't be found by us today who is to say that at least some Mesolithic people didn't adopt farming to being assimilated by the incoming farmer societies maybe they survived by being useful after all they knew the land [Music] the DNA picture isn't as simple as replacement farmers on open in the Hebrides show a mixed Brett on Neolithic and British Western hunter-gatherer profile but perhaps most astonishingly of all when residents of the cheddar region in Somerset had their DNA tested in a landmark study to uncover if any connections with cheddar man existed a local teacher could trace his genetic code all the way back to that Western hunter-gatherer who lived nine thousand years before often frontier societies are the most dynamic because of the intermixing of different groups and early Neolithic Britain was no exception soon enough embarking on an epic age of megalithic building unsurpassed in all of Europe just maybe this could have been at least in part the result of a mixing of both ways of life [Music] the best explanation today is that the hunter-gatherer population of Britain just wasn't very high in comparison to the newcomers they did mix but left little genetic legacy overall down the long millennia to come throughout all of human history to the present farming societies have revered hunting holding it up as a noble pursuit fit only for the highest echelon of society often using it as a status symbol rather than inhabiting a world of man versus nature this was now a world of those with power and those without next time we'll be looking at Neolithic Britain and the incredible culture of monuments and megaliths that came with it the age of the stone circles you've been watching history time don't forget to Like and subscribe and I'll see you on the next one you

Channel: History Time

Views: 811,073

Rating: 4.8293438 out of 5

Keywords: iMovie, hunter-gatherers, hunters, gatherers, prehistory, prehistoric, ancient, ancient europe, europe, european, history, archaeology, anthropology, hunter gatherers, historical, jericho, history time, doggerland, documentary, history documentary

Id: vTyojqbW6lM

Length: 59min 56sec (3596 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 16 2020

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