The diet of early Britain from the stone age

During the earlier years of the human race, the food people had available would depend on where they lived in the world, varying greatly from region to region, but in Britain, it remained the same for thousands of years, with the quantity and techniques varying more than the actual food.

(A selection of the Stone age weapons you’d have to use to catch your dinner)

Stone Age food

The Stone Age began around 2.5 million years ago but it wasn’t up until around 50,000 years ago that people became known as what we recognize today as “human”. There hasn’t been any substantial evidence that people started farming before 10,000 BCE as a source of food production, but purposely planted crops have been found in small, isolated communities of early humans, but not in any quantity to support them on farming alone.

It’s important to remember that human populations would have been drastically lower, with far less than 100,000 people on the whole British Isles. Roads and towns wouldn’t have existed and the wilderness would have covered the entire territory, providing a huge amount of wild food for a skilled hunter-gatherer. Here is a list of some foods that would have been available to people in Stone Age Britain.

Vegetables and Grain

Beans, peas, chickpeas, lentils, carrots, turnips, and wild vegetables like nettles and seaweed. Since these crops weren’t farmed, they would be found in patches and be additions to meals instead of something to rely on. As for grain, there were two known types of wheat which were called Emmer and Einkorn, one type of Rye and one type of Barley.

(Grain would have been made into bread, cereals, porridge and cooked into liquid dishes. It would have been commonly eaten food for most of the population)

Fruit and Nuts

apples, blackberries, raspberries, cherries, elderberries, sloes, mountain ash berries, strawberries, hawthorn, and bilberries. As for nuts, the only ones we know for sure were present in Britain during the Stone Age were Acorns and Hazelnuts, with the other species being introduced after the Iron Age by the Romans.

Fish and meats

The fish currently in the UK would be the same now as they were in the Stone Age, but numbers would be greatly higher. Salmon would pack certain rivers and be in greater numbers than people could eat, with trout, perch, pike, eel, and a range of coastal fish like bass, cod, and flounder appearing on a Stone Age menu.

(The Megaloceros is now extinct, but would have been 3 to 4 times the size of a modern deer)

Meats would have been very different than they are now as many animals existed during the Stone Age that aren’t around anymore, like the megaloceros which is also known as the Irish Elk, a gigantic deer that would have towered over a human. Cave bears, mountain lions, sheep, goats, wild boar, cows, and a selection of game birds and animals would have been hunted. The ice age ended around 10,000 BCE at which point most of the bigger winter animals had died out, but before this such beasts as the woolly rhino and Mammoth would have walked the lands. All of which would be on the menu and would need to be killed with nothing more than sharpened stone.

The Bronze and Iron ages

The Bronze Age started around 3,000 BCE and lasted until about 800 BCE when people discovered how to melt and craft iron. By the time the Bronze Age started, populations in the country were significantly higher than during the Stone Age, and farming was now a necessity. The land bridge that used to connect present-day England and France was flooded around 8,000 years ago, giving people plenty of time to wander over from the mainland before the Bronze Age started. People began to establish permanent homes and farmed their own crops, so they didn’t have to rely on animals that might migrate away or wild plants that could be eaten by birds or herbivores. This was also the time when people in Britain started to farm flax, a long-stemmed grass-like plant that was used to make linen, giving people an abundant source of clothing instead of having to rely on wool and animal skins.

(Flax can be used to make rope, cord, fishing nets, and clothing, and also provided a seed that could be pressed to provide an oil used for cooking or curing wood, most commonly known as linseed oil)

Trade with other nations was far from becoming commonplace during the Bronze Age and the crops they ate were the same as those from the Stone Age, with the only major difference being that they were now produced on farms instead of gathered. One thing that did become very popular in the Bronze Age was the raising of animals because they could be herded across the land to feed themselves. A type of large cow called an Aurochs (a species now extinct) was the first type of cattle to be domesticated, and sheep, goats, and pigs were captured and their young raised as domesticated animals.

The biggest change in people’s diets during the Iron Age was the amount of grain they ate. Bronze is made from combining copper and tin and is stronger than either metal alone, but still isn’t strong enough to effectively plow deeply into the soil without bending or breaking for any prolonged period of time. Iron on the other hand was strong enough to plow large amounts of land and was now the reason that one person with a plow could now do the work of 50 people with hand tools. Grain was also the only thing they could mass produce that could be dried and would be safe to keep through the winter.

It isn’t known which crops were traded with nearby nations during the Iron Age because no one in the country had any kind of written language, but for an idea of the crops they wouldn’t have had, here are a few crops that are known to have been introduced from the Roman age and later.

Broccoli, cauliflower, celery, cucumbers, chilies, onions, leeks, cabbage, radishes, asparagus, garlic, shallots, corn, walnuts, almonds, figs, grapes, pears, plums, damsons, mulberries and a huge range of herbs and spices and of course, potatoes.