From the Ice Age to the Iron Age, the diet of early Britain

The complete diet of humans in times as far back as the ice age will never be fully known, mostly because people who hadn’t discovered pottery yet didn’t exactly have the option of writing things down. The written language in Britain didn’t arrive until after the Iron Age had ended, and so we are forced to piece together small finds here and there that have been found at the various dig sites around the country to try and get an accurate impression of what people ate as far back as 9000 BCE.

The Ice Age

The last ice age ran from about 2.6 million years ago and started to end around 11,500 years ago. What we recognize as “Humans” weren’t around until between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, depending on who’s research you listen to. At the start of this time, humans would have been evolving out of their previous stage and wouldn’t have looked like the humans we know today until around 50,000 BCE, at which point they would have been what people know as cavemen.

When the ice age was in progress, plant life would have been extremely limited and people would have to rely mostly on meat and fish. Animals that would have been on the menu include the woolly mammoth, giant sloths, woolly rhino, Megaloceros (a type of giant deer), cave bears, and various small game animals like hares and wild birds.

Since they were forced to eat a very limited diet and lived such dangerous lives, their life expectancy was very small, with reaching the age of 40 probably making you the oldest person in the village.

The Stone Age

The ice age fully ended around 8,500 BCE and when it did plant life exploded around the country. Forests spread rapidly and seeds took root and produced an enormous amount of wild food. Gone were the days of having to eat nothing but meat for years at a time and in its place stood a whole new range of wild berries, edible roots, and new animals.

(A selection of Stone Age tools recovered from dig sites around the UK)

Because the population of Britain was so small, there was ample wild food for everyone and people lived hunter-gatherer lifestyles at this stage. Many of the animals built to survive the Stone Age weren’t able to evolve fast enough to the new climate and so creatures like the woolly rhino and mammoth died out. In their place, a series of other animals previously unable to withstand the cold populated the wild and spread quickly in the lush environment they had before them.

Fishing could now include freshwater river fish like salmon and trout, previously hidden under tons of solid ice, and coastal gathering for shellfish was now possible. Meat included the Ibex (a type of mountain goat), Aurochs (wild cows), wild boar, sheep, and the occasional bison. Animals would have existed in numbers much greater than the human population and wouldn’t normally be a problem to find, though killing them with a flint spear was another story.

Berries such as apples, blackberries, raspberries, and elderberries would have been gathered in mass during the summer, and nuts would also be available in massive amounts during the fall, providing one of the few preservable foods to last the winter.

Bronze age

During the bronze age people still lived mostly hunter-gatherer lifestyles but also now had the option of farming. Raising animals was seen as being more productive and much safer than hunting everything, as wild herds can move great distances away from a settlement and have much higher chances of carrying some kind of harmful bacteria or parasite, especially meat-eating animals like bears and wolves.

Sheep, goats, pigs, and cows were domesticated in small amounts since they were difficult to feed in large numbers. During this age hunting would still have been plentiful and wild game could still provide a consistent diet, and backed up by the small amount of farmed crops this saw populations steadily increase across the country.

The Iron Age

Around 800 BCE someone in Britain discovered how to melt iron, a previously untouchable material that no fire could melt. After realizing that coal and bellows were needed to reach the necessary temperatures, the technology of how to use iron swept the country and gave birth to a previously unobtainable invention, the plow.

(A recreation of the type of plow used on Iron Age farms)

Previously the strongest metal known in Britain was bronze, a combination of copper and tin that’s stronger than both metals on their own, and even though it was fine for things like axes and basic tools, it lacked the strength needed to rip through soil attached to the back of an ox.

When the iron plow arrived it allowed one person to do the same amount of work in a day that would have taken 50 before, and so large-scale grain production was now on the table. The reason that grain changed everything was because of how easy and safe it was to dry and preserve, lasting for several years if done properly. This allowed people to grow a year’s worth of preservable food in a single summer and it was all thanks to the plow.

Here’s a list of some of the crops known to have been farmed during the Iron Age in Britain. Other crops could possibly have been produced but the following are ones that have been found within the various Iron Age dig sites across the country.

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

Vegetables:
chickpeas, peas, lentils, cabbage, leeks, and bitter vetch (a type of bean)

Fruit:

Planted on a semi-wild basis
Pears, elderberries, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries

On top of the controlled crops hunting and gathering would still have been a massive part of Iron Age life, with seasonal harvests on things like nuts and roots topping up their farmed goods. The life expectancy of someone in the Iron Age would be below 60, but it’s because of these newly farmed crops that people saw a much more varied and balanced diet, paving the way for humans to increase their health and lifespan over the next few centuries.