The Neolithic people were of a short and dark stock which still forms a large proportion of the natives of Northern Spain, Southern France and Northern Italy. It is also to be seen in the British Isles in Wales and the Scottish Highlands where the Paleolithic inhabitants of Britain were driven to seek sanctuary against the superiority of the bronze weapons of invading Gaels or Giodels.
The people of the New Stone Age drifted gradually across Europe from the Middle East and crossed the English Channel to reach the southern British Isles about 5,000 BC.
The climate had become warmer and the forest cover thicker and animals which could be hunted for food became rarer. The people of the New Stone Age had domesticated cattle, goats, horses and pigs and tilled the soil with light hoes freeing themselves from the need to follow the animals which had previously provided Stone-Age man with food.
Domesticationof livestock and agriculture enabled these people to live in permanent settlements and they grouped their homes mostly on the chalk and limestone uplands.
Neolithic people made crude pottery with rounded bases which were easier to stand upright on grass or in the lap without toppling over than flat-bottomed pots. They were made by hand, without the use of a wheel, and crudely fired.
Rounded bone and stone scrapers were being used to treat skins and to polish stone weapons.
Neolithic people with their domesticated livestock, primitive technology and cultivated fields near their permanent settlements had began to live a form of human existance which we would recognise rather than the animal-like existence of their Stone Age predecessors.
We tend to think that "civilisation" and the erection of complex structures arrived in the British Isles with the invasion of the Romans in the
first century AD but many sophisticated structures pre-date the Roman invasion by thausands of years.
Skara Brae on Orkney dates back to 3,200 BC and consists of a complex of ten stone houses, complete with stone furniture and interconnected by a maze of covered stone passages, the whole having
been enclosed in an earthen mound. The "built-in" furniture, a notion which we have only returned to in the latter part of the 20th century,
included seating, storage space and beds. The complex even includes a rudimentary drainage system.
When one considers the appalling conditions under which the agricultural labourers of, say, rural Dorset or Wiltshire lived in the 18th and 19th centuries or the squalid conditions prevailing in the industrial slums of the 19th century, the settlement at Skara Brae must be considered quite luxurious in comparisson, if rude by modern standards.
Skara Brae, part of a World Heritage Site, recieves 55,000 visitors a year raising concerns about damage to this ancient site by the visitor numbers.
