[Prehistory - 55 BCE] Prehistoric Britain

Our story begins nearly a million years ago, on a land that was not yet an island. Prehistory - 55 BCE. This was not the gentle, green Britain of postcards. This was a peninsula of Europe, a cold and unforgiving frontier connected by a vast, low-lying plain of marsh and river channels we now call Doggerland. The air was thin and sharp with a relentless cold. Across this landscape, herds of woolly mammoths and giant deer roamed, their heavy footfalls shaking the frozen earth. And stalking them were the first, fleeting human visitors. These were not our direct ancestors, not *Homo sapiens*, but earlier species like *Homo heidelbergensis*. For hundreds of thousands of years, their presence was a ghost-like flicker. They would arrive during warmer interglacial periods, leaving behind the stark evidence of their existence: a flint hand-axe, sharp and teardrop-shaped, found in the gravels of a riverbed; or the butchered bones of a giant elephant. The most astonishing clue lies at Happisburgh in Norfolk: a set of footprints left in ancient estuary mud 900,000 years ago, the oldest evidence of humans found anywhere outside of Africa. Then, inevitably, the ice would return, a silent, crushing wall of white, erasing their world and forcing them back to the continent. This brutal ballet of survival, of advance and retreat, played out over millennia. The world changed forever around 10,000 BCE. The last great Ice Age shuddered to a halt. As the colossal ice sheets that had covered much of the land melted, a great weight was lifted from the earth’s crust, and the land itself began to rebound, to rise. But the melting ice also fed the seas. Water levels surged in a slow, inexorable flood. The rivers of Doggerland swelled, the marshes turned to sea, and sometime around 6,500 BCE, the final, tenuous land bridge was submerged. For the first time, Britain was an island. The people who lived through this dramatic reshaping of their world were Mesolithic, or Middle Stone Age, hunter-gatherers. The megafauna were gone, replaced by dense forests of pine and birch teeming with red deer, wild boar, and elk. Life became more settled, more attuned to the seasons and the rich resources of the rivers and coasts. Their technology adapted. They crafted tiny, razor-sharp flint points called microliths, which they set into wood or bone to create deadly barbed harpoons for fishing and arrows for hunting. At a site called Star Carr in Yorkshire, archaeologists uncovered one of the most evocative finds from this entire period: headdresses made from the skulls and antlers of red deer. Were they hunting disguises? Shamanic ritual gear? We can only guess, but they give us a profound glimpse into a mind concerned with more than just food and shelter—a mind that held beliefs, rituals, and a sense of its place in the wild new world. Then, around 4,000 BCE, another revolution arrived, not with the crash of melting ice, but on the prows of simple boats crossing the channel. These newcomers from continental Europe brought with them a radical idea: farming. The Neolithic, or New Stone Age, had begun. This was perhaps the single greatest transformation in Britain's history. The nomadic lifestyle of the hunter began to fade. People started to clear the ancient forests with a new tool of astonishing effectiveness: the polished stone axe. They tilled the soil, planted the first wheat and barley, and corralled domesticated cattle, sheep, and pigs. For the first time, people built permanent homes, clustered together in small villages. A spectacular example survives at Skara Brae in the Orkney Islands, a stone-built settlement so well-preserved we can still see the dressers, beds, and hearths inside their semi-subterranean houses. With settlement came pottery, a way to store grain and water, and a new sense of community, of place, of ancestry. And it was this sense of ancestry that drove them to the most staggering achievements of the prehistoric world. They began to build monuments to their dead, great communal tombs known as long barrows. But their ambition soared higher. They began to build henges—vast circular earthworks and timber or stone circles. The greatest and most mysterious of these is Stonehenge. Its construction was a multi-generational obsession. It began around 3,000 BCE as a simple ditch and bank. Centuries later, its builders undertook an almost unbelievable feat. They quarried over 80 bluestones, each weighing two to four tons, from the Preseli Hills in Wales and transported them over 150 miles to the Salisbury Plain. How? By raft, by river, by hauling them on wooden sledges with ropes of twisted hide? We don't know for certain, but the sheer collective will is breathtaking. A few hundred years later came the final, iconic phase: the raising of the colossal sarsen stones, some weighing up to 40 tons, which were dragged from 20 miles away and shaped with stone hammers before being levered into their final, monumental arrangement, a temple aligned with the movements of the sun. Around 2,500 BCE, a new technology arrived, again from the continent: the secret of metal. The Bronze Age dawned, and with it, a new kind of society. Prospectors discovered that Britain was rich in copper and, crucially, tin—the two ingredients needed to make bronze. This knowledge was transformative. A bronze axe was more durable than any stone tool; a bronze sword was a weapon of terrifying new power. Society stratified. A new warrior elite emerged, defined by their wealth and their control over the production and trade of this precious new material. Burial practices changed. The great communal barrows of the Neolithic were replaced by individual round barrows, where chieftains were laid to rest with their prized possessions: golden jewellery, amber beads, and ornate bronze daggers. Britain, with its vital tin resources, was no longer isolated. It was now a key player in a web of trade and influence that stretched across Europe. This age of bronze gave way to the Iron Age around 800 BCE. Iron, smelted at a higher temperature, was stronger and, because its ore was more common, more accessible. This didn't level society, but it did change the nature of power and conflict. The defining feature of the Iron Age landscape became the hillfort. All across Britain, communities fortified hilltops with colossal earthwork ramparts and deep ditches. Some, like Maiden Castle in Dorset, grew into the size of towns, their multiple rings of defence a stark testament to a more violent and unstable world. Inside these defences, people lived in roundhouses, their conical thatched roofs a familiar sight across the countryside. They were farmers, blacksmiths, weavers, and warriors, living in complex tribal societies with distinct cultures and fierce loyalties. This was the world of the Celtic-speaking Britons. They were not a single, unified people, but a patchwork of tribes, trading with each other, fighting with each other, their lives governed by druidic priests and warrior kings. For centuries, this world turned on its own axis. But to the south, a new power was rising, one whose organisation, discipline, and ambition were unlike anything the Britons had ever known. Whispers and refugees began to cross the channel, speaking of the relentless advance of the Roman legions through Gaul. Then, on a summer’s day in 55 BCE, the people living on the white cliffs of the Kentish coast looked out to sea. On the horizon, they saw a sight that would signal the end of their world and the beginning of a new chapter in history: the sails of the Roman fleet, with Julius Caesar aboard. The age of prehistory was over. History was about to arrive with fire and steel.