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Historical outline of the United Kingdom
Britain has not always been an island. It became one only after the end of the last ice age. The temperature rose and the ice cap melted, flooding the lower-lying land that is now under the North Sea and the English Channel. The first evidence of human life is a few stone tools, dating from one of the warmer periods of the ice age, about 250,000 BC.
Around 10,000 BC, as the ice age drew to a close, Britain was peopled by small groups of hunters, gatherers and fishers. Few had settled homes, and they seemed to have followed herds of deer which provided them with food and clothing. By about 5000 BC Britain had finally become an island, and had also become heavily forested.
About 3000 BC, Neolithic (or New Stone Age) people crossed the narrow sea from Europe in small round boats. These people kept animals and grew corn crops, and knew how to make pottery. They probably came from either the Iberian Peninsula or even the North African coast. They were small, dark, and long-headed people, and may be the forefathers of dark-haired inhabitants of Wales and Cornwall today. These were the first of several waves of invaders before the first arrival of the Romans in 55 BC.
After 3000 BC, people started building burial mounds (barrows), chambered tombs, and ritual centres called “henges” (great circles of earth banks and ditches with wooden buildings or stone circles inside). Wiltshire, in south-western England, has two spectacular examples of this architecture: Silbury Hill, the largest burial mound in Europe, and Stonehenge, one of the most mysterious and complex ritual sites in the world.
After 2400 BC, new groups of people arrived in southeast Britain from Europe. They were round-headed and strongly built, taller than Neolithic Britons. Their arrival is marked by the first individual graves, furnished with pottery beakers, from which these people get their name: the "Beaker" people. The Beaker people brought with them from Europe a new cereal, barley, which could grow almost anywhere.
The Beaker folk probably spoke an Indo-European language. They seem to have brought a single culture to the whole of Britain. They also brought skills to make bronze tools and these began to replace stone ones. Stonehenge remained the most important centre until 1300 BC. The Beaker people’s richest graves were there, and they added a new circle of thirty stone columns, this time connected by stone lintels. Life of the society continued to be centred on a number of henges across the countryside.
However, from about 1300 BC the henge civilisation became less important, and was overtaken by a new form of society in southern England, that of a settled farming class. At first this farming society developed in order to feed the people at the henges, but eventually it became more important and powerful as it grew richer. Hill-forts replaced henges as the centres of local power, and most of these were found in the southeast. From this time, except for short periods, political and economic power has remained in the Thames valley and southeast Britain.
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