Mesolithic

You had to be really smart back in the Stone Age. That’s what hooked me. That and the sunken lands.

The Mesolithic is the time between the end of the last ice age and the dawn of agriculture. People were people back then. They looked like us. They had brains like ours. They had language but not writing. It’s totally fair to imagine ourselves in their places, or them in ours. They didn’t have our scientific knowledge about how the world works, but they were keen, practical observers of their environment; they wouldn’t have survived otherwise.

As nomads, they didn’t have physical infrastructure, but they had knowledge infrastructure. They built up a culture around how to make tools, clothing, and shelter. They knew how to hunt game and forage for food: what’s available when, what’s safe to eat, what’s poisonous, and what’s medicinal; how to prepare and preserve it. They had to know a lot just to stay alive, and they would have grown up with it woven into the fabric of daily life, not studied in a classroom.

Nomads travel. They might stay in camps for days or weeks - to collect flint for tools, to catch spawning salmon, or for winter shelter - but they covered a lot of ground over the cycle of the year. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of migration and trade over large distances.

In many ways, it was a surprisingly idyllic life. It’s the lifestyle we evolved with, and we had hundreds of thousands of years to get good at it.

Agriculture would later greatly increase the density of people the land could support, but the individual quality of life suffered. Foragers ate a variety of foods - game, nuts, roots, berries, plants - which changed throughout the year, rather than a few staple crops. The variety of foods, and the ability to migrate in search of them, gave foragers better food security. The loss of any one was not the disaster that crop failures would be.

Hunting and foraging gave them varied and mostly mild physical exercise, rather than the repetitive and back-breaking work of plowing, weeding, and harvesting. They probably only had to work 3-4 hours a day to provide for themselves. A fair amount of their work would be things that people today do as hobbies: hunting, fishing, picking berries, weaving, basket-making. Most of the chores were collaborative, and they would have been working alongside family and life-long friends.

Of course there were downsides - medical care in general and childbirth in particular - but the lower population density meant better hygiene and less disease than in crowded towns and cities. There’s evidence of prehistoric people recovering from broken bones and living to a ripe old age.

There’s also a lot to be said for not having much stuff. When the only way to move your possessions is to carry them on your back, you tend not to have a lot of possessions. Which means you don’t have much worth stealing. And when you can feed yourself from the landscape and aren’t tied to any particular place, it’s hard to compel you to do anything.

A farmer is tied to their land. They’ve put a lot of time and effort into cultivating it so that it will eventually produce food. But when it does, anyone can take that away by force. In nomadic cultures, there can still be fights over hunting or fishing territory, or access to limited resources like flint. But you’re not going to get rich attacking people.

Now, I have to stop and admit that all this will strike anyone who knows me as a strange fascination. I am not an outdoors guy. I don’t go camping. I have trouble even wrapping my head around how anyone lived before central heat and air conditioning. These people just slept out in the open, or in some sort of primitive shelter - nothing solid enough to leave an archaeological record. That blows my mind, but I think that’s part of the fascination - it’s such an alien lifestyle to me.

The straightforwardness of work is also appealing. Like I said, it wasn’t simple: If I got zapped back to ten thousand years ago, I wouldn’t have the knowledge or skills to stay alive for long. But it’s generally very clear what needs doing. You don’t spend a lot of time agonizing about what your goals and objectives should be, or whether you’re meeting your Key Performance Indicator metrics. The product of your work is something tangible. You’re literally putting food on the table. (Actually, the table would still be metaphorical.)

I write software for a living. Nothing I do is tangible. It’s only useful to my employer. I can’t share it with friends and family, or even really explain what I do all day. Most of my actual work I do by myself. Collaboration is mostly a necessary evil to make sure I’m working on the right thing. It’s kinda isolating. The idea of a job that’s mostly crafting, berry picking, or hunting - and that you do in a group of people - is pretty appealing.

Beyond the people and culture, it was also a different landscape. The climate and vegetation of northern Europe changed as the glaciers of the last ice age receded. There were wild animals - mammoths, aurochs - which are now extinct. More than that, the land itself was different.

Ten thousand years ago, the last ice age was still receding, the ocean levels were lower, and Britain was just a pointy bit in the corner of Europe. Ireland was still connected to Scotland. The English Channel and much of the North Sea were a broad river valley, now known as Doggerland, which would have been a rich habitat for game.

You can see why the stone age would be a great setting for fiction. For a writer, there’s a lot of room to play in, a lot of blank space on the map. The people are pretty much like us, but in a very alien culture. We know some basics about the physical remains of their lives, but not even much about that. They didn’t build big permanent settlements. They didn’t have a lot of possessions, and most of those were made of wood or leather, which rarely survive. Every once in a while they’d throw together something like Stonehenge, just to give us something to puzzle over.

Apparently, it’s also a compelling setting for video games.

All of this is also fuel for zombie apocalypse scenarios - what it would be like if civilization collapsed and we ended up back at some sort of hunter-gatherer stage. Once we run out of canned goods, bullets, and welding gear, what would life be like? It’s scary to realize how much knowledge is required to survive in that world. We probably have plenty of people who know how to farm their own vegetables and raise animals by hand, but far fewer who could trap game and feed themselves off of wild plants.

If we did end up all the way back at a forager society, there’d be a couple of big things that would still be different. In terms of physical resources, we have lots of extracted metal lying around. That would save us having to mine it. But the bigger thing is what we know and how we think about the world. We have writing, so that even if books didn’t survive, we’d be able to share what we’re (re-)learning.

This is a great time to be studying archaeology, thanks to advances in technology over the last twenty years or so. The study of the new helps the study of the old. A lot of our knowledge about Doggerland is due to oil drilling in the North Sea, which calls for extensive and detailed geology and mapping of the ocean floor. The bane of environmentalists has been a boon to archaeologists.

DNA analysis has allowed us to follow the migrations of tribes and (mostly) settle an even older question. It was long known that Neanderthals and Sapiens both existed in Europe at the same time before the Neanderthals became extinct. What wasn’t known was whether they cross-bred at all. We now know that in modern people something like 4% of our DNA comes from Neanderthals.

Aerial photography has allowed us to identify archaeological sites, and ground-penetrating radar gives us some idea what’s there before we start digging. Modern forensic science tells us much about people from their bones: gender, age, health, injuries, cause of death. We’ve even turned up intact bodies, preserved in peat bogs or glaciers, and have been able to identify the remains of their last meals. Kinda gross, but awesome.

Another delightful irony is that people are using high-definition digital cameras and internet streaming video to teach prehistoric skills. You can learn how to knap flint into cutting tools and arrowheads, start fires by hand, build shelters, and more. There’s one guy in Australia who’s gradually building a homestead from scratch in a series of strangely compelling, wordless videos - he just went into the jungle barehanded and started making tools from rocks and sticks, then using those tools to make more tools and shelters.

Aside from YouTube, there are also podcasts about archeology. In fact, there’s an entire Archaeology Podcast Network. One of its shows is “Prehis/stories”: archaeologists talking about fiction set in prehistoric times. Yes, they do get around to Clan of the Cave Bear, but the first book they cover is Wolf Brother. This is the first of a YA series set in Norway around 10,000 years ago. It has elements of fantasy, but it’s quite detailed and apparently accurate in its portrayal of life in that time. And it’s a good read.

One very good non-fiction book I’d recommend is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The first part of it is all about prehistoric life. The second part is about the Agricultural Revolution, and how that made things worse for just about everyone.

Lastly, if you get a chance, stop by the City Museum of London. That’s where this all started for me. I was there last year, and the first section of it is all about prehistoric London - the tribes that lived in the region tens of thousands of years ago. Something about that captured my imagination, so when I got home I started digging into that slice of history.