Stone Age to Iron Age
History · Key Stage 2 · The School
Three ages, named after what people cut with
The STONE AGE is by far the longest — hundreds of thousands of years, ending in Britain around 2500 BCE. The BRONZE AGE follows, when copper and tin were mixed to make a harder metal. The IRON AGE begins around 800 BCE, when people learned to work a metal that is common but needs much greater heat. The names come from tools because tools are what survives.
Farming changed everything
For most of the Stone Age people moved with the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. From around 4000 BCE in Britain, people began to farm. Once you plant a crop you must stay to harvest it, so you build a permanent house; you can store a surplus, so some people can do other work; you own land, so it can be inherited and fought over. Almost everything else follows from that one change.
Knowing without writing
Nobody wrote anything down, so this is PREHISTORY and everything we know comes from what was left: post-holes where timber rotted, tools, pottery, burials, and monuments such as Stonehenge and Skara Brae. Archaeology can tell you what people ate and how long they lived. It cannot tell you what they believed or what they called themselves, and honest history says so.
Scientists once faced a puzzle. Around 1300 BCE, three ships sank off the coast of Israel. Tin bars, called ingots, were found in them. Tin is a rare metal that smiths mixed with copper to make bronze. Where was it mined? Researchers measured tiny traces of lead and other elements in the ingots. Ores from different places carry different traces. They compared the results with tin ores from many places. In 2019 Daniel Berger's team judged that Cornwall was the most likely source. In 2025 a team led by Durham University tested ingots from these wrecks and a fourth, off southern France, from around 600 BCE. Their results pointed to ores in south-west Britain. Traders probably passed the tin along in stages.