Civilized Ireland

The key invention that ushered in the Neolithic Age was farming, fundamentally changing the fabric of Mesolithic society because people no longer had to spend all their time hunting. Additionally, they could built much larger, more permanent dwellings and, perhaps most importantly, had enough 'spare time' in which to innovate and think about things.

The practice of farming had spread from the Middle East, through eastern and southern Europe to reach Britain around 4000BC. One of the most important legacies left by the Neolithic farmers was their megaliths, or large earthen constructions, used primarily as burial places.

The Neolithic Age left a great mark on Ireland. The upland forests were cleared for farmland, and by the end of the age people were starting to clear the lower forests. Sheep, goats and cows had been imported into Ireland for the first time. Megalithic tombs peppered the landscape. By the time Bronze was introduced to Ireland around 2000BC, Neolithic culture was evident across Ireland.

Neolithic settlers cleared forests with stone axes, or by burnt them, in order to build farms. But as Ireland did not have many native cereal crops, and wild pigs were the only farm animals native to Ireland, these settlers introduced cows, goats and sheep - transported across the Irish Sea on wooden rafts towed by skin-boats or dugout canoes. They also brought wheat and barley.

The picture on the left shows Newgrange, a so-called passage tomb located in county Meath and is the most famous passage tomb in the world. The front half of the remarkable structure has been painstakingly restored to look as it did when built 4,500 years ago, which makes Newgrange at least as old as the Egyptian Pyramids and older than Stonehenge. Numerous other megaliths were also constructed in the Boyne Valley.

The beautifully carved stones at the entrance make it a worldwide attraction, as does the fact that the sun shines directly down the main passage at dawn on the winter solstice around December 21st. At the end of the main passage are three smaller chambers that may have been used for burying the dead.

The impact of why an ancient people buried a small room under 200,000 tons of rocks, so that a tiny ray of light might come in, can easily be lost on us. These people, a simple, Neolithic farming community, living nearly 5,200 years ago, with no concept of tools, set about to build a monument which would take over twenty years to complete, requiring a labor force of three hundred strong men, that would ultimately yield a single small room.

Each year for five days around the December 21 winter solstice - the shortest day of the year - the sun shines deep down the main passage, flooding with light a chamber where the remains of the dead were once laid. Newgrange was masterfully aligned by its builders so the sun only cuts through the gloom of the chamber at sunrise through a small window above the entrance. But if there is no midwinter sun, the solstice "clock" doesn't work.

When the tomb's solstice phenomenon was discovered in 1967, archaeologists were astonished Stone Age builders had the architectural skills and scientific understanding of the sun's movement that was needed to construct it.

The Megaliths

In Lebanon, in a place called Baalbek, are several huge carved stones. They are ancient. It's one thing to carve and shape rock without using metal, but it's quite another to then move said block of stone ...weighing over 1000 tons. Comprising a nearby wall in fact there are other stones weighing 800 tons each. This is truly puzzling. The largest land-based cranes in the world today can only lift 200 tons.

These cyclopean stones are certainly not Roman. The square cut Roman stones are heaped on top of them by the Arabs or Crusaders, whoever turned the ruins into a medieval fortress.

With respect to architecture and moving large stones, there is also the mystery of ancient Egyptian temples and famous monuments, such as The Sphinx, to consider. However, in the middle of the Mediterranean, is the island of Malta and its megalithic structures. Adding to their mysterious construction, and not to mention the strange Cart Ruts, are the thousands of elongated human skulls found originally deep inside - and now removed.

Across the ocean, in Costa Rica are the enigmatic Stone Balls, perfect spheres, weighing up to 30 tons each - now modern lawn ornaments. Further south and west, in Bolivia, in a place called Tiahuanaco, located on the shores of Lake Titicaca, and carved upon an ancient wall, comprising the famed 45 ton Sun Gate, is a calendar, which they claim dates this civilization as early as 16,000 BC. There are only ruins left now at Tiahuanaco.



Tiahuanaco is found at a height of some 13,000 feet, and lies on a plateau that looks like the surface of a foreign planet. Many of Tihuanaco’s buildings were constructed of massive finished stones, many tons in weight, that were placed in such a manner that only a people with advanced engineering methods could have designed and transported them.

According to Incan mythology, after a catastrophic flood, it was from Lake Titicaca that the creator god Viracoca rose up to create the sun, moon, stars, and first human beings. Recently, a large temple was discovered submerged in the lake, adding to its mystery and fascination.



The ruins at Tiahuanaco are intriguing. Between 10 to 20 thousand years ago, in the Neolithic era, Tiwanaku was apparently in its glory. The massive fallen stones which were used to build this massive city now lie oddly scattered about, seemingly tossed about. The stones are so large that even today, it would be a technological marvel to take them from the mountainous quarry they were brought from, fifty miles away.

Adding to the dilemma... there is evidence that Titicaca was once a saltwater sea. Its shoreline is littered with millions of fossilized seashells. The marine fishes and seahorses in the lake are all oceanic types found only in salt water. Some researchers are convinced that these 3-mile high ruins once lay at sea level.

Stone Age Medicine

According to archaeologists, the first time Stonehenge was used by humans was about 8,000 years ago - a short time after the glaciers had melted and retreated, and long before the Trypilians had built their cities north of the newly formed Black Sea. Thus, someone traveling through England 10,000 years ago set up a healing centre or an astronomy centre - for ancient ancestors who were our fabled 'watchers of the sky'.

These people were not entirely at the mercy of the elements. They understood the benefit of specific herbs and also could use a scalpel as was obviously required in those dangerous times. They, moreso, and based on evidence of trepanation, had skilled brain surgeons among them. Their patients in fact survived these painful operations without further infection.

The oldest trepanned skull, found at a neolithic burial site of Ensisheim in France, is more than 7,000 years old, and trepanation was practised by the Ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, Romans, Greeks and the early Mesoamerican civilizations.


When Otzi the Iceman had his 5,300 year-old stomach contents analized, scientists found six types of moss - some with apparent medicinal qualities. One type of moss found, Sphagnum Imbricatum, is a natural antiseptic.

Skulls dated to 7,000BC excavated recently in western Pakistan have been found to have holes drilled into their molars. At least nine people living in a village in Mehrgarh, near the Bolan river in Balochistan, had holes drilled into their molars and appeared to have survived the procedure, evidence of Neolithic dentistry.

China’s Neolithic archaeology began with the 1921 discovery of Yangshao culture in Henan Province. Since 1977, pre-Yangshao (10,000 BP to 6950 BP) cultures such as those at Cishan, Peiligang and Dadiwan have been found in the Yellow River Valley, filling the missing link in archaeological chronology and offering resources for the study of the origin of agriculture, animal husbandry and pottery production.

A pottery cauldron containing boiled medicinal herbs unearthed in 2001 in Zhejiang Province indicates that Neolithic people used natural herbal medicine as early as 8,000 years ago.

Several new studies have found that taking devil's claw (an herb used for
thousands of years by the Khoisan peoples of the Kalahari Desert) can substantially reduce pain and improves physical functioning in people with osteoarthritis. In a large, well-designed 4-month study including 122 people with knee and hip osteoarthritis, devil's claw root powder reduced pain and improved functional ability as effectively as standard doses of a leading medication for osteoarthritis.

Physical evidence has confirmed that ancient Chinese were producing fermented, wine-like drinks from rice, honey and fruit as early as in 7,000 BC according to scientists who are examining residues of the ancient shards of pottery from a Neolithic site in north China. Before the Jiahu discovery, the earliest evidence for an alcoholic drink in human history was the resinated wine inside two jars excavated at Hajji Firuz Tepe, Iran, dating to about 5,400 BC.

One Man's Treasure

Moving over time from the safety of caves and the risk of the hunt to a more sedentary lifestyle and an assigned daily task, mankind is an enigma during the Neolithic. A true mystery. We supposedly walked around clubbing our women for five million years, throating nothing more than "ug", and then one day 5,000 years ago we suddenly got smart. This was the advent of the divisive Bronze Age.

Homo Sapiens Sapiens have been sitting around the campfire for 130,000 years, and then about 17,000 years ago the earth suffered a mass catastrophe, unfortunately for mankind. It was an event that a few very hardy, and lucky, species would survive.

However, prior to the glaciers melting rapidly, along with many other natural calamities: earthquakes, volcanoes and tsumanis, not to mention the mile-high floods caused when massive ice dams eventually collapsed, men for a hundred thousand years had developed naturally in a warm and cosy Middle Earth.

The land was lush and fertile, providing ideal conditions for growth. So people, like you and me, grew up and shared their acquired knowledge. Then one day their world fell apart.

We teach our children that cavemen ruled until civilization suddenly arose between the Tigris and Euphrates about 6,000 years ago. This is about the same time in history that the enigmatic Trypilian culture erupted north of the Black Sea.

Scientists today who study climate change based on ice core samples know that another drastic and rather fatal event, occured 5,000 years ago. Now our own ancestors are found communicating and building, monumentally, in 3,100BC and not only along the banks of the Nile, but simultaneously around the world. This is when history begins in fact - and thus ending the Neolithic (New Stone) Age.

The Neolithic is a bridge through time. It links what once was and what is. Throughout the misunderstood Neolithic period survivors eventually stumbled upon ancient ruins. These rugged individuals did not know much, but they were quick learners and soon their newfound discoveries eclipsed a life in the caves.

In the UK, there are a lot of ancient ruins and plenty of evidence of a people who traveled the land leaving an occasional signpost for their descendents or simple rude grafiti to ponder, starkly acknowledging their reality and frustration. Maybe the most of what they left behind is under water these days.

On land, large carvings and mysterious pieces of so-called rock art have been discovered in the northern part of England. These artefacts, when combined with anamolies like the Glozel Alphabet - taken from the Glozel Stones, could prove as valuable as the Rosetta Stone connecting our ancient and modern civilizations. String has been found and dated to the Neolithic.

How apt therefore, that there remains a megalith in Rennes-le-Château.
On this rock dug from a natural basin, were realized, through hammering with flint, about ten cruciform signs: a cross on a triangle and 8 single crosses. They are anthropomorphic representations representing human stylized silhouettes, according to the conventions of prehistoric design. They are characteristic of the Neolithic of the south of France and date back to 4000 to 4500 years.

Near Stonehenge, a 4,500 hundred year-old skeleton of a man was unearthed. Buried with the bones was a treasure trove of gold and copper – the richest Neolithic grave ever uncovered in Britain.