Stone Age to Iron Age
History · Key Stage 2 · The School
Three ages, named after what people cut with
The STONE AGE is by far the longest — hundreds of thousands of years, ending in Britain around 2500 BCE. The BRONZE AGE follows, when copper and tin were mixed to make a harder metal. The IRON AGE begins around 800 BCE, when people learned to work a metal that is common but needs much greater heat. The names come from tools because tools are what survives.
Farming changed everything
For most of the Stone Age people moved with the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. From around 4000 BCE in Britain, people began to farm. Once you plant a crop you must stay to harvest it, so you build a permanent house; you can store a surplus, so some people can do other work; you own land, so it can be inherited and fought over. Almost everything else follows from that one change.
Knowing without writing
Nobody wrote anything down, so this is PREHISTORY and everything we know comes from what was left: post-holes where timber rotted, tools, pottery, burials, and monuments such as Stonehenge and Skara Brae. Archaeology can tell you what people ate and how long they lived. It cannot tell you what they believed or what they called themselves, and honest history says so.
A flint hand-axe: chipped from stone found locally, made by one person in an afternoon, and it works. A bronze sword: needs copper AND tin, which are rarely found together, so it needs TRADE over long distances, and a smith. An iron sword: iron ore is common and everywhere, so once the technique spread, weapons and ploughs became available to ordinary people. The material changed who could have what.