What did people eat in the Stone Age?

The Stone Age in Britain ended around the year 3500 BC with the discovery of how to use copper. Before this people would have to hunt and farm with nothing but wood and flint, and so were limited to a very small list of foods. Another thing that people don’t realize when it comes to food we grow in Britain today, is that most of the crops we have didn’t start here. Potatoes came from America, Types of grain came from the Middle East and Africa, and many varieties of fruits and vegetables were brought in from all over the world to be cultivated on British soil.

(The Megalocerus, also known as the Irish elk)

During the Stone Age, people had none of these things, but with the tiny human population and the massive expanse of wilderness across the whole country, it was more than possible to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Here’s a small selection of foods people used to eat in Stone Age Britain:

Meats:
Depending on exactly “when” in the Stone Age you’re referring to, animals such as the woolly Rhino and cave bear would have been on the menu. The Megalocerus was one of the most sought-after Stone Age animals, often referred to as the Irish Elk, this creature was a giant deer that stood several feet higher than a person.

More widely recognized animals would include wild boar, deer, otters, pigeons, hares, and seals and if food was scarce predator animals such as wolves and wild dogs would also have been hunted. They also had access to the eggs of wild birds, though chickens and most types of duck and geese in the country today were brought in from elsewhere long after the Stone Age ended.

(The Stone Age and Ice Age overlapped, leading to people running into things like the Whooly Rhino.)

Seafood:
Since they didn’t have fabrics, fishing nets were either made very poorly or not at all, leaving people to fish with spears and traps. This meant that only the larger river-dwelling fish such as salmon were most often caught, along with lobster, crab, eel, and anything else that wandered into their traps.

One thing that’s well-known about Stone Age people is they liked to stay near the coast, and ate large amounts of shellfish and seaweed. There are large piles of empty shells dated to the Stone Age in Scotland called midden mounds, where people would sit on a regular basis and throw the shells of mussels and cockles in the same place, creating large stone-age rubbish heaps.

Fruit and Nuts:
Fruit would have been available in huge quantities but only for a short period of time. Brambles and Elder trees were present during the Stone Age and both spread like weeds, providing a huge amount of fruit for anyone who wanted it. Apart from this strawberries, raspberries, sloes, and plums would provide a nice harvest-time sugar boost, and since they couldn’t store them for more than a few days the summer fruit harvest was a time for feasting.

Nuts would have been much more limited, as most of the nuts grown in the UK today were brought in from elsewhere. The 2 main nuts from the Stone Age would have been Hazelnuts and acorns, both of which were used extensively. Acorns were made into all kinds of bread and cakes and were also able to be preserved by drying, making up one of the very few types of preserved food they could use for the winter.

vegetables:
Beans, chickpeas, and lentils were amongst the first crops to be cultivated at the end of the Stone Age, but most other vegetables we have today were brought in after the Stone Age ended.

Various wild vegetables were found here and there by gathering parties, but no type was eaten more than the stinging nettle. Available for most of the year in whatever quantity you like, nettles provided an easy-to-find ingredient that was most likely eaten by being quickly wilted over a fire to kill the stings before being eaten raw.

Grain:
The first grains to be cultivated in the stone age were Emmer and Einkorn, which are both types of wheat, and Barley. Corn and oats came much later and for hundreds of years, people relied entirely on wheat and barley, learning how to dry and preserve them and make them into beer.

Stone age cooking
Pottery didn’t appear in the British Isles until just before 4,000 BCE, but before this, there was nothing to boil water in or make a stew. All cooking would have been done by roasting over an open flame, or perhaps a type of primitive ground oven would have been made.