Profile
Photos
Comments
I would to fnd someone with a time machine, just to be able to take a quick look how it was back then . . .
The Stone Age builders who created Britain's earliest known house were nomads - tribes who wandered northern Europe following deer, wild cattle and elk.
Although Britain had been visited by hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years, it was only at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago - when the glaciers finally retreated from Scotland - that the country became permanently occupied.
At the time the sea level was hundreds of feet lower than it is today and Britain was connected to mainland Europe by a bridge of marshy, low lying land.
The discovery of red deer skulls used as masks near the site - and the fact that it was used for such a long period of time - raises the possibility that it was some kind of temple, used for strange, long forgotten rituals.
The creators of the hut wore animal skins and furs, stitched together with crude thread. The furs came from fox, beavers and pine-martins, while the skins were made from the hides of deer and wild cattle.
They were beginning to experiment with woven fabrics and had mastered basket weaving from reeds.
Thousands of miles away, in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia, the earliest farmers were learning how to sow seeds and domesticate animals in a discovery that would transform the world - and herald the age of villages, writing and civilisation.
But in northern Europe, the hunter-gathering way of life that had served prehistoric man for millennia remained unchallenged
