Neolithic British Isles

[4] It was in the Near East that the "most important developments in early farming" occurred in the Levant and the Fertile Crescent, which stretched through what are now parts of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Iran and Iraq, areas that already had rich ecological variation, which was being exploited by hunter-gatherers in the Late Palaeolithic and the Mesolithic periods.

Archaeologists believe that the Levantine peoples subsequently developed agriculture in response to a rise in their population levels that could not be fed by the finite food resources that hunting and gathering could provide.

[7] Until recently, archaeologists debated whether the Neolithic Revolution was brought to the British Isles through adoption by natives or by migrating groups of Continental Europeans who settled there.

The arrival of farming populations led to the almost-complete replacement of the native Mesolithic hunter-gatherers of the British Isles, who did not experience a genetic resurgence in the succeeding centuries.

[8] The 2003 discovery of the Ness of Brodgar site has presented an example of a highly-sophisticated and possibly-religious complex in the British Isles dating from around 3500 BC, before the first pyramids and contemporary with the city of Uruk.

[citation needed] "After over a thousand years of early farming, a way of life based on ancestral tombs, forest clearance and settlement expansion came to an end.

"From the Beaker culture period onwards, all British individuals had high proportions of Steppe ancestry and were genetically more similar to Beaker-associated people from the Lower Rhine area.

[13] The process of the introduction of agriculture is still not fully understood, and as the archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson noted: There is no doubt that domesticated animals and plants had to be carried by boat from the continent of Europe to the British Isles.

It would have involved deforesting an area, digging and tilling the soil, storing seeds, and then guarding the growing crops from other animal species before eventually harvesting them.

[16] Between 4300 and 3250 BCE, there was a widespread decline in the number of elm trees across Britain, with millions of them disappearing from the archaeological record, and archaeologists have in some cases attributed that to the arrival of Neolithic farmers.

Such Neolithic tombs are common across much of Western Europe, from Iberia to Scandinavia, and they were therefore likely brought to the British Isles along with or roughly concurrent to the introduction of farming.

[19] A widely-held theory amongst archaeologists is that those megalithic tombs were intentionally made to resemble the long timber houses, which had been constructed by Neolithic farming peoples in the Danube basin from circa 4800 BC.

[20] As the historian Ronald Hutton related, "There is no doubt that these great tombs, far more impressive than would be required of mere repositories for bones, were the centres of ritual activity in the early Neolithic: they were shrines as well as mausoleums.

For instance, in the marshland of the Somerset Levels in south-western Britain, a wooden trackway was built in the winter of 3807 BC and connected the Polden Hills with Westhay Mears, a length which ran for over a kilometre.

[25] The first to do so was the antiquary and writer John Aubrey (1626–1697), who had been born into a wealthy gentry family before he went on to study at Trinity College, Oxford, until his education was disrupted by the outbreak of the English Civil War between Royalist and Parliamentarian forces.

[25] Nonetheless, Aubrey's work was picked up by another antiquarian in the following century, William Stukeley (1687–1765), who had studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge before he became a professional doctor.

The term "Neolithic" was first coined by the archaeologist John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, in his 1865 book Pre-historic times, as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages.

[27] In the 1960s, a number of British and American archaeologists began taking a new approach to their discipline by emphasising their belief that through the rigorous use of the scientific method, they could obtain objective knowledge about the human past.

The processual archaeologists took a particular interest in the ecological impact on human society, and in doing so, the definition of "Neolithic" was "narrowed again to refer just to the agricultural mode of subsistence".

They interpreted the Neolithic as an ideological phenomenon that was adopted by British, Irish and Manx society and led to them creating new forms of material-culture, such as the megalithic funerary and ceremonial monuments.