Man's skeleton, 5th to 7th century AD, from the Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Westgarth Gardens, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
A selection of polished flint axeheads, Neolithic period, c.4500-2000 BC from various locations in Suffolk
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The first hunters 400,000 - 8500 BC
The Paleolithic or Old Stone Age describes the hundreds of thousands of years - over 95 percent of all human existence - that people lived as roaming hunters. Using stone, flint, antler, bone and wood for their tools and weapons, they followed the seasonal patterns of animal and vegetable life. For much of the period, ice sheets covered our local landscape and life would have been impossible. However, there were warmer spells in the Ice Age lasting 20,000-30,000 years when hunting groups would roam north-westwards from Central Southern Europe across what is now the North Sea and English Channel. At Hoxne, hand axes and flakes have been found dating from one of these warm spells around 350,000-300,000 years ago - the Hoxnian Interglacial.
Seasonal settlers 8500- 4500 BC
When the glaciers finally retreated around 10,000 BC, a bleak wilderness slowly became covered in forest and people evolved new technologies to deal with their surroundings. The Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age describes this period when hafted axes and 'composite' tools like harpoons and spears made from several tiny razor-sharp microliths appear for the first time. These sophisticated hunters and fishers used fire and axes to make clearings in the forest and developed complex tools and equipment, though rarely does anything other than flint or stone survive.
The first farmers 4800 - 2500 BC
Sometime after 5000 BC a new economy and new technology including pottery begin to appear. The Neolithic or New Stone Age as it is called features a much more sophisticated toolkit of flint with blades, knives, scrapers and other flake tools, together with leaf-shaped arrowheads. People were now farming: domesticating animals, growing crops. Permanent settlements now appear for the first time, and we can even see trade links emerging. Stone axes made in Cornwall, Wales and Cumbria have been found locally. Evidence now appears for the first time to distinguish the "haves" from the "have-nots": high status burial rites must have been for a tiny elite; purely symbolic instruments of power like "mace-heads" were now made and used.
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