A rough guide to what life was like for our ancestors

Survival today consists of working a job and going to the supermarket whenever you want food. You can even have everything delivered right to your home, from furniture to cars, all you have to do is go online or pick up the phone. Most people today know nothing of the hardships our ancestors had to endure just to stay alive, and in an age where world trade, electricity, and medicine don’t exist, simply staying fed would be a constant battle.

There have been many stages of evolution and technological development throughout human history, and each stage came with its own dangers and rewards, but all of them were difficult to live in for the average person. Here are the main periods of mankind and how difficult they would have been to survive through:

Middle Paleolithic – 200,000 – 50,000 BC

Before this period came the lower Paleolithic which started as far back as 2,500,000 BC, but during this time we weren’t really people. The lower period contained an evolutionary time when homo-erectus and Neanderthals somehow evolved into what we recognize as modern-day humans.

Making an entrance into the game of life some were around the middle of the period, people would have still been very animal-like at this point, using only the most basic wooden and stone tools and living hunter-gatherer lifestyles.

Daily life would have consisted of hunting large game animals such as the woolly rhino, Megaloceros, and Mastodon while the other members of the tribe stripped the local plants of berries and nuts. There is evidence of fire starting from as old as 400,000 years, suggesting that before this people would most likely have eaten their meat raw.

Home would consist of animal skins draped over sticks, as this age was still way too early for the invention of mortar or thatching. Surviving here would be mostly a case of luck, as hunting such big and dangerous animals just to survive combined with the complete lack of medicine made it a very risky way to live.

There were no farmed crops at this stage, but since the populations would have been so small, and a 4-ton woolly rhino provided a huge amount of meat it would have been much easier to find food than most people would think, the trick is managing to kill it with a stone spear.

The other threat people would have to deal with non-stop would be that the middle Paleolithic period was when the ice age was still very much in effect. The only bonus this would provide is that fresh water would be everywhere, but since they hadn’t even discovered pottery yet this wouldn’t do them much good. Hunting huge animals in freezing temperatures while trying not to get sick living in a hut made from sticks and pre-historic elephant skin, and all the while only eating a handful of different foods. It goes without saying that we were pretty lucky to be born in our current age.

Upper Paleolithic – 50,000 – 10,000 BC

This was the crossover period from the ice age to a more habitable climate. The last ice age ended around the year 11,700 BC and quickly revealed huge areas of land that were previously covered in ice, which in turn led to new plants and animals being discovered to hunt and gather.

Life during this time would have been the same as living during the previous period, though the climate was starting to become a little nicer. Clothing was still made from animal skins and people still used flint tools and weapons, but the most significant change of this era was the increase in the world’s population. There are many estimates on how many people there were in the world at 10,000 BCE, but most estimates put the number anywhere between 1 and 15 million people globally.

As populations increased and more sources of food became available, the discovery of farming changed everything. The amount of wilderness allowed people to survive by hunting and gathering, but when people started to mass in the same area, it was the only way to provide enough grain for a growing population, with the first examples of large-scale farming in human history coming from an area in the middle east called Mesopotamia.

People in this age also didn’t have pottery yet, so even though farming was done, it happened with very basic hand tools. Home would have been similar to the previous age, with the invention of thatching and log sawing still way off.

Mesolithic / Neolithic – 10,000 – 3000 BC

This is when things really started to get interesting, with the oldest building on earth believed to be a temple-like structure called Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey, thought to have been built around the year 10,000 BC. How they managed to build such a structure is hotly debated, as again, they didn’t have pottery yet, and carving stones using other stones is difficult to say the least.

Flint tools and weapons would have been the normal tools of the trade for this age, but they did make advances in home building, giving birth to the classic Celtic roundhouse. They also started to mass produce grain as it was the only food source that was guaranteed to last all year round, assuming the rats didn’t get to it of course. The selection of crops they had was limited but it is known the following were grown in Stone Age Britain:

Grain:
Emmer and Einkorn (which are both types of wheat), Barley

Pulses:
Lentils, chickpeas, flax, peas, and bitter vetch (a type of bean that is dangerous to eat without cooking)

Fruit was also eaten but not normally grown, as the amount of space the plants take up would be much more productive if it were grain or vegetables, instead, the fruit was gathered and planted on a semi-wild basis.

All of this grain led to someone leaving it in a container for too long after it got wet, and so beer was invented. This age also saw the invention of mead, which was the drink of choice for anyone who wanted to get drunk.

The end of this age saw the invention of copper and led to the sub-period of the copper age which started around 3500 BC, but it didn’t last long as people discovered alloys which led to the next age.

Bronze Age – 3000 – 1000 BC

Bronze is an alloy made up of two metals, copper and tin. Copper has a melting temperature of 1,085 °C which is achievable on a large fire, especially if there’s coal and bellows present. Tin melts at 231.9 °C which means it would have been discovered much earlier, but the metal is way too soft to do anything with and wouldn’t be worth making tools or weapons from.

When combined they make bronze, which is considerably stronger than the two individual metals and has the strength to create weapons and even armor. Even though a bronze hammer isn’t as good as an iron one, it’s more than enough to give people the chance to mine their own metals and create more efficient tools.

Living in this age would consist of living in a round or long house with a thatched roof, and spending your days working the fields or spinning yarn into rope or clothing. Fishing also advanced massively in this age, as the invention of a usable metal also allowed to creation of better fishing hooks and workshops for creating nets.

Because people could now farm flax, they were able to produce linen and for the first time in history, people moved over from wearing animal skins to linen clothing. Wool was also now being produced on a large scale and gave people another material to make their clothes from, though early wool products were often heavy and itchy and preferred for things like blankets and outer layers.

Iron Age – 1000 BC – 44 AD (In Britain)

Iron has a melting point that is too high to reach in any fire and requires the use of a smelter combined with coal and bellows to produce the necessary level of heat. No one worked this out until around the year 1000 BC depending on which country you’re looking at, but it was generally within 400 years globally, with Britain entering the Iron Age around 800 BC.

The discovery of iron changed everything, with it being considerably stronger than bronze. This meant whoever had the most iron weaponry was likely to win a fight against the much weaker bronze-using opponents, and so a race to gather this precious resource began.

Iron was also not only strong but had a high enough melting temperature to place it over a fire and cook anything you wanted. It would also be used for building bigger and more elaborate structures, and more importantly allowed the creation of more advanced ships, something that bronze just didn’t have the strength to do.

More crops also became available, being brought from areas across the seas previously unreachable. Homes would have still been very basic but log cabins were now available and the larger long and round houses were starting to pop up, using iron casts to hold bigger roofs and support beams.

Daily life would have been a life of farming for the average peasant, who would endure the non-stop harvesting of grain and tending farm animals. Some people were lucky enough to have their own animals at this stage, as more advanced farming tools allowed people to produce enough food to feed them.

It wasn’t unusual for people to live in the same home as the animals did, with longhouses often being separated in the middle, with one half acting as a living space and the other a stable for your pet cow and a couple of pigs.

The Iron Age ended in Britain in the year 43 AD after the Romans invaded. They brought with them not only the technology to make steel but also more advanced forms of governance, transport, and many new crops and animals. The rest of the world came out of the Iron Age several hundred years either side, depending on which country it is.