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Hello and welcome to Home School History. I'm Greg Jenner and I've spent my whole career

making history fun on the TV show Horrible Histories and more recently on the BBC Podcast

you're dead to me, although that's mostly for the grownups.

With everyone being cooped up in the house, I thought I'd deliver a snappy history lesson

to entertain and educate the whole family, who says that homeschooling can't be a bit of fun.

Today we are venturing back thousands of years to prehistoric Britain and paddling our little

boats along the Scottish coastline to a seriously special Stone Age settlement, Scarab Ray.

The Stone Age was an enormous stretch of time in human history, which lasted about 2.5 million years.

It was first named the Stone Age in Victorian times when archaeologists divided it into three,

the oldest being the Paleolithic period, then you get the Mesolithic period, and then the Neolithic period.

And this was based on the types of tools that people used. Actually modern archaeologists think

the three categories are a bit wrong now, but the names seem to have stuck, so we'll use them anyway.

Today we're going to focus on the last phase, the Neolithic, also known as the New Stone Age.

And when I say Stone Age, you might be thinking of cave people or Fred Flintstone.

But these Neolithic people were actually closer in time to us than they were to the people living in caves during the Ice Age.

In Britain, the Neolithic started only 6,000 years ago and lasted for about 1,500 years.

Now that might seem like age is a way, but if you think about it in terms of your family tree,

that was only 170 grandmas ago. Back in my day!

The Neolithic era was when the world witnessed the farming revolution, and though I don't mean

angry farmers waving protest signs. No, this was when people first started growing crops and

keeping animals for food instead of hunting and gathering in the wild. Now this was hugely important,

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