Arrival of farming in Britain and Ireland and the rise of megaliths
- Date
- c. 4000 BCE
- Category
- Social & demographic
- Region
- British Isles and Atlantic Europe
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
Around 4000 BCE the Neolithic 'package' — domesticated cattle, sheep and goats, cultivated wheat and barley, pottery, polished stone axes and timber houses — reached the islands of Britain and Ireland, carried across the sea by farmers from continental Europe and adopted by indigenous communities.
The transition was accompanied by a remarkable tradition of monumental construction: long barrows, causewayed enclosures, court cairns, portal tombs and great passage tombs such as Newgrange. Most of these monuments were raised between roughly 4000 and 3200 BCE, demonstrating sophisticated communal organisation, surveying and astronomical alignment. Comparable megalithic building flourished at the same period along the Atlantic façade — in Brittany, Iberia, Scandinavia and Malta. The Neolithic transformation of north-western Europe marked the final frontier of the westward spread of farming and left some of the most enduring prehistoric architecture on Earth.
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Related social & demographic events
- Uruk becomes the world's first cityc. 4000–3100 BCE
- The Cucuteni–Trypillia mega-settlements of Eastern Europec. 4100 – 3600 BCE
- The Varna necropolis and the oldest worked goldc. 4600 – 4200 BCE
- Rise of the Yamnaya Culture and Steppe Pastoralismc. 3300 BCE
- Anatomically modern Homo sapiens appears in Africac. 300,000 years ago
- The Natufian culture and the first sedentary hunter-gatherersc. 15,000 – 11,500 years ago (c. 13,000–9500 BCE)
Further reading
The wider story
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
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