Parc Cwm Long Cairn - History

History

Main article: Prehistoric Wales See also: History of Wales and Neolithic

From the end of the last ice age (between 12,000 and 10,000 BP) Mesolithic hunter-gatherers began to migrate northwards from Central Europe; the area that would become known as Wales was free of glaciers by about 10,250 BP. At that time sea levels were much lower than today, and the shallower parts of what is now the North Sea were dry land. The east coast of present day England and the coasts of present day Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands were connected by the former landmass known as Doggerland, forming the British Peninsula on the European mainland. The post-glacial rise in sea level separated Wales and Ireland, forming the Irish Sea. Doggerland was submerged by the North Sea and, by 8000 BP, the British Peninsula had become an island. By the beginning of the Neolithic (6,000 BP) sea levels in the Bristol Channel were still about 33 feet (10 m) lower than today. Historian John Davies has theorised that the story of Cantre'r Gwaelod's drowning, and tales in the Mabinogion of the water between Wales and Ireland being narrower and shallower, may be distant folk memories of that time. The warmer climate caused major changes to the flora and fauna of Great Britain, and encouraged the growth of dense forest that covered 80–90% of the island.

Human lifestyles in North-West Europe changed around 6000 BP; from the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) nomadic lives of hunting and gathering, to the Neolithic (New Stone Age) agrarian life of agriculture and settlement. John Davies notes that such a transformation cannot have been developed by the people living in North-West Europe independently, as neither the grain necessary for crops nor the animals suitable for domestication are indigenous to the area. Recent genetic studies conclude that these cultural changes were introduced to Britain by farmers migrating from the European mainland. They cleared the forests to establish pasture and to cultivate the land, developed new technologies such as ceramics and textile production, and used a similar tradition of long barrow construction that began in continental Europe during the 7th millennium BP – the free standing megalithic structures supporting a sloping capstone (known as dolmens), common across Atlantic Europe that were, according to John Davies, "the first substantial, permanent constructions of man". Such massive constructions would have needed a large labour force (up to 200 men) suggestive of large communities nearby. However, in his contribution to History of Wales, 25,000 BC AD 2000, archaeologist Joshua Pollard notes that not all Neolithic communities were part of the simultaneous "marked transformations in material culture, ideology and technical practices" known as the Neolithic Revolution.