The History of Britain - Part 1

What is an archaeologist?

• someone who writes books about pre-history and history

• someone who excavates sites and looks at artefacts from the past

• someone who studies dinosaurs

• someone who works in a museum

Answer explanation

a person who studies human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artefacts and other physical remains.

Source: The Oxford English Dictionary Online

'Pre-history' means the time before what existed?

• written records

• drawings

• humans

• pets

Answer explanation

'History' means everything that has happened since people began writing - in any language or culture, not just the alphabet used in our country today. Before this is called 'pre-history', where other artefacts have been discovered to tell us how humans lived, but nothing was written down yet.

Which of the facts below are correct?

• The Stone Age is split into 3 main periods: The Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

• The Stone Age began 1 million years ago.

• The Stone Age is the time when humans and dinosaurs lived together on Earth.

• The Stone Age lasted around 2.5 million years and is split into 3 main periods: Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic.

Answer explanation

The Stone Age began about 2.6 million years ago. It is split into the Old Stone Age (also called Paleolithic Period), followed by the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic) and then the New Stone Age (Neolithic).

The oldest archaeological finds show us that humans lived on Earth for almost three million years before they discovered how to make metal. It is the longest historical period in the human timeline.

Stone Age people mostly lived in...

• trees

• caves or tents

• stone buildings

• farms

Answer explanation

Very few permanent settlements have ever been discovered from the Stone Age.

The earliest human shelters were natural caves or rock shelters. People also made

tents with frames made from wood or animal bones covered with animal hides.

During the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, they began to build more advanced huts. They started weaving sticks or reeds around a structure, and then filling the gaps with a mix of soil, clay or animal dung. These were sometimes thatched with reeds, mud and turf. Places like Skara Brae in Scotland show that some stone villages did exist at the very end of the Stone Age.

Around 700,000 BC, when the first humans lived in Britain, it was not the island we live on today. They could have walked to the rest of Europe and which other continent?

• Australia

• North America

• Africa

• Antarctica

Answer explanation

These images show how the continents we know today looked before human history.

This is because of the movement of the tectonic plates of the Earth's crust and happened very slowly over hundreds of millions of years.

Why did Stone Age people move around a lot?

Include as much details as you can.

Answer explanation

Stone Age people were hunter-gatherers. They either hunted the food they needed form animals or gathered it from trees and other plants.

They moved around from place to place so that they could get what they needed, which often depended on the seasons and the weather.

After the Stone Age came the ______ Age, where tools, weapons and objects began to be made out of metal.

Answer explanation

The Stone Age was followed by the Bronze Age which began around the year 2300 BC.

Bronze is made up of at least two metals, usually copper and tin. The invention of bronze was important because it allowed people to make objects like weapons, armour, tools and building materials that were much stronger and more durable than before.

Historians think that Prehistoric people built _________ as places to gather, perhaps for religious ceremonies or celestial observations.

• roads

• houses

• tombs

• monuments

Answer explanation

Stone monuments were of great importance to prehistoric peoples.

Archaeologists and historians believe they were often a place of ritual or ceremony, used as astrological markers, areas of tribute, trading sites or gathering places.

Can you draw an example of a Stone Age or Bronze Age monument?

Towards the end of the Stone Age and into the Bronze Age, people became _______ instead of ______ _______.

Clue: They mostly got their food from kept animals as well as wild ones and they started to grow crops.

Answer explanation

Stone Age people were hunter-gatherers.

This means that they only ate what they could catch or forage.

Their diet was mostly meat and fish that they would have hunted using nets, bows and arrows or flint-tipped spears.

They would also have eaten fruits, berries, nuts and seeds.

Early Stone Age humans would not have eaten any dairy products, such as milk or cheese, because they didn’t raise animals for meat or milk.

They also wouldn’t have eaten grains like wheat or oats because they didn’t farm.

During the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods, finding food was a constant daily challenge. However, by the Neolithic period, people had started farming.