Lesson video

Hello, I'm Mr. Hutchinson, and welcome to history.

We've been learning all about prehistoric Britain, and we've been learning so much about what it was like a long, long time ago, millions of years ago and thousands of years ago for people and how they lived before there was writing.

Hold on a second though, if there was no writing, then how do we actually find out about what life was like then? Well, we've been investigating how people lived using artefacts, and we've already looked at some of the artefacts that helped give us clues about how people lived.

I'm going to continue doing that today.

So our big question today is what can artefacts, those objects that humans made from the Stone Age, tell us about how people lived during the different periods? And we're going to look at some actual artefacts, and we can see from those artefacts, from those objects, they give us clues about how people lived, and if the artefacts change during different time periods, then we can see how life changed for people and how people developed, so it's really useful to know.

Our lesson will look a little bit like this.

We're going to recap our timeline first of all.

Then we'll look at some archaeology and why archaeology is important.

Next, we'll learn about some materials that were used by early humans during the Stone Age and prehistory.

Then we will actually study some real artefacts from the Stone Age.

I'm going to show you some.

And we'll finish with our end of unit quiz as usual.

So first of all, let's recap our timeline.

You should know this period pretty well now.

We've looked at it in each of our lessons.

You should be starting to remember some of the dates and some of the chronology, which things came in which order.

So let's recap that and see what you can remember.

First, we're going to zoom straight into the last hundred million years.

So this, these chunks are 10 million years, and 65 million years ago, something very important happened.

Can you remember what happened 65 million years ago? Well done if you said the dinosaurs went extinct.

Excellent, you can say it out loud if you would like to.

You can say it to your screen to see if you were right.

After the dinosaurs went extinct, we got the age of the mammals.

We're a type of mammal, but there are lots of other animals that are also mammals, and they've started to take over all of the world, so there's no dinosaurs to eat them.

The humans though, us, our species, only started to come around very, very recently in terms of all of this history.

So for most of the period of the mammals, we can see that there were no humans around.

There's a big gap of millions and millions and millions of years between the first humans and the dinosaurs going extinct.

So we turn up quite recently, only about 2.

5 million years ago.

So let's zoom into this little period here.

So now each of these blocks is a million years.

So that's 10 million years ago, that's what this timeline represents.

And the first humans appear, can you remember when the first humans appeared, when the first humans evolved? Well done if you said 2.

5 million years ago, great work.

The first humans arrived about 2.

5 million years ago.

It's a key date.

Now remember they weren't humans like us.

They were humans, a different type of human.

All of those kinds of humans have gone extinct now.

We look to the different types of humans like Homo erectus and Homo habilis.

They've gone extinct now.

And quite recently, our type of human, us, Homo sapiens, appeared evolved.

Do you remember when Homo sapiens evolved? How many years ago did our species of human evolve? Well done if you said 300,000 years.

Homo sapiens, our species, is about 300,000 years old.

So let's zoom in just to that last 2.

5 million years.

The first humans arrived 2.

5 million years ago.

That's when the first humans evolve.

Homo sapiens, our species, not until the last 300,000 years.

And 2.

5 million years ago, when the first humans started to use stone tools, we call that the Palaeolithic era.

There was then another era, the Middle Stone Age, what was the proper name, the scientific name for the Middle Stone Age? Can you remember? Great work, the Mesolithic era.

So we get the Mesolithic era, and then the last little tiny bit, the New Stone Age, only lasted a few thousand years.

What was that called, the New Stone Age? It's proper name? The Neolithic era, great work, well done.

You already know, look how clever you are, you know so much about this period.

It's quite a complicated timeline now, and you know all about the different things that happened throughout prehistory.

Great work.

So how do we know about this era, the Stone Age, the Palaeolithic era, the Mesolithic era, and the Neolithic era? Well, there are some very special people that help us to find out, and they're called archaeologists, and they do archaeology.

You can see an archaeologist here working really hard, and he's got all sorts of different items in front of him that he's discovered.

And that's what archaeologists do.

They find and study objects made by people from the past.

And those objects, if you find an object, and it's been made by a person from the past, then there's a name for that kind of object, and it's called an artefact.

So an artefact is any object that was made by a person.

Very often, these artefacts, these things from the past, they become buried over time, so over thousands or tens of thousands or maybe even millions of years, the soil has been washed over them, and it's rained, and there's been storms, and the land has changed, and so they get buried underground.

And so archaeologists often have to dig down, sometimes quite far down, to find these artefacts.

And archaeologists are still finding artefacts all of the time.

They would have found some today.

They're constantly finding artefacts to give them clues about the past and people that lived in the past.

So the artefacts, once they found those artefacts, they start to think, I've just found this, I wonder what it is, and I wonder what it tells me about how people used to live.

So let's see if you can complete a few different sentences to help understand why archaeology and archaeologists are so important.

So your first sentence I'd like you to write out is this one.

Archaeologists are people who and objects made by people from the past.

So a couple of words need to go in there.

Can you think about what those words could be? I'm going to give you the next few sentences as well before you pause.

The next sentence is these objects are called.

What are those special, what are objects called if they were made by a person from the past? They can help give us about how people lived.

This is why archaeology is important.

This is the evidence that we have to find out about the past.

So some of the key words that you might like to use there are study, clues, artefacts, and find.

Can you write out these sentences putting those words in the correct spaces? Pause the video and give that a go now.

Great work.

Let's see if you were right.

So it should read archaeologists are people who find and study objects made from the past.

Give yourself a big tick if you got it right, well done.

These objects are called artefacts.

Give yourself a tick if you got it right.

If you got it wrong, no worries, you can correct it.

Make sure you got the spelling correct there as well.

If you got the spelling wrong there, edit it.

Correct spelling's important.

These can help give us clues about how people lived.

Big tick or a fix.

All of those key words went to the right space.

So we call this period often the Stone Age, but stone wasn't the only material that humans were using.

They did use stone.

They used stone to make their tools and to make their weapons and for other things.

But stone wasn't the only material that they were using.

So which other materials did early humans use? Well one thing that they used are plants.

So they would, as they walked around, they would use whatever was around them, the natural resources of the environment.

And there were lots plants that were really, really useful, especially these kind of like crawler plants.

I've actually got some of these in my garden, and they grow, and they're quite strong, and they try to attach on to different things.

And those plants can be really, really helpful at making things like cord for example, so cord is kind of like a kind of string that you make, and if you collect those plants together, then you'll be able to make a kind of string.

So plants would be something that people used.

They might also use this stuff.

It's thick, it's sticky, it's clay.

It's kind of like mud, but if you make it wet, you can shape it, and then when you dry it out, it goes very hard.

And so early humans would have used clay, especially if they were building things like homes.

They would pack it into the walls, and it would give them the structure of their homes.

They would also use wood.

Used wood for all sorts of things.

They might use it for tools, they might use it to burn, they might use the bark off the wood for shelter, or they might use the actual bits of wood to build their shelters.

Wood was very important.

It's not just those materials that they used.

They did use plants and clay and wood, but they also used animals.

So early humans, prehistoric humans, would use all of the animal.

They didn't waste anything.

If they hunted an animal, if they killed an animal, they would use all of it.

They would use the bones.

So here we can see some antlers from a deer it looks like or a stag.

And they would use those bones as tools or as weapons.

They'd also use the fur or the wool from animals.

They would help to keep them warm, or they might make bedding.

You might have a woolly hat or a woolly jumper now.

Prehumans would do the same thing.

They would use the wools and the furs of the animals to keep them nice and warm.

And the last thing are the skins of the animals, which you can turn into leather by drying them out and specially sort of treating them.

And that leather would be useful to make either tents, so once it's sort of dried out, then the skin, the animal's skin, the leather could be made for temporary shelters, for tents, and then rolled up and carried with them.

Or they might have used it for clothing.

They might have cut it into clothing maybe to protect their feet or maybe to protect their body, because leather's very, very tough and durable.

It lasts a long time.

So those are the different materials that would have been available to early humans.

I'd like you now to make a list of all the different things that humans could make using those materials.

So using those materials and the stone that's available to them, what could they have made? What could they have combined together to make? So the names of the different materials are just below them here now in case you've forgotten.

I'd like you to stop and make a list of all the different things that early humans could have made using these materials.

Pause the video and give that a go now.

How long is your list? I bet you got some great ideas for the different things that early humans would have made.

I was imagining that they might have used maybe like a stick from the wood from a tree, and they might have used some of those plants to like tie a bow onto it to make a kind of like spear or maybe even a stone to make an axe.

I'm sure that you came up with some great ideas for all of the different things that early humans would have used.

So let's look now to real artefacts, okay.

Let's study some real artefacts.

Have a close look at these.

So these are artefacts from the Stone Age.

They're from, I think that these are from the Neolithic era in fact.

They're in the British Museum at the moment.

You can see that they've taken a photo of them there.

And these are flint cutting tools.

So flint is a kind of stone, and it's a really useful stone, because it's easy to shape.

You can chip away at it.

And if you look closely at this flint, you can see just along the edges the chip marks where they've chipped away at it to give it a sharp edge.

And then this flint tool becomes like a knife.

They can hold it in their hand, and they can cut animals' skins and cut anything else like meat, strips of meat that they might need to, cut into fish that they catch, and these are a really useful cutting tool.

So flint is useful because it's easily shaped.

You can get a nice sharp cutting edge on it.

And it's really readily available.

There would have lots of flint lying around.

So if you had a flint cutting tool, and it broke, you can just throw it away, pick up another bit of flint, and start again.

What about this, take a close look at this.

What's this? What do you think that it? This is an axehead.

So if put that on it's side, that would be an axehead.

It's made out of a kind of stone called jade or jadeite.

And this has been specially shaped to turn it into an axehead.

So this would obviously be very heavy and powerful.

Now you might think, oh, this would be useful in a battle, or this would be useful against an animal.

But early humans probably didn't use it for that.

This is from the Neolithic era when humans weren't hunting so much.

They were doing more farming.

And so this jadeite axe was probably used for clearing out trees and woods so that people had a nice flat settlement to grow their new crops in.

And they'd attach this of course to a wooden sort of shaft, a wooden stick, and then it could be used to break down animals, so if they do have an animal they've killed, they can break down the animal easily using this tool.

Oh, this is one of my favourite artefacts.

This is called a saddle quern.

So it's a big heavy rock, and there's a smaller rock, and you use it to grind, and you grind wheat into flour, so they would take the wheat off the barley or the malt, all the different kinds of grains, and they would put them in that saddle, so they'd put them in this bottom bit, and then they'd push that rock over it until it ground it down into flour.

So what does this artefact tell us about the lives of people that were living there where this was found? What does it tell us about how they lived and what they did? Write an answer to that question there.

What does this saddle quern tell us about the lives of the people living where this was found? Pause the video and write your answer to that now.

So this gives us a few clues.

It tells us a few things.

It reveals something about the past.

It tells us that they had flour, that they made flour, that they were farming grain.

And if they were making flour, it tells us a little bit, something about what they were probably eating.

They were probably eating bread, because that's what we make with flour.

So by finding this saddle quern, we can start to get clues about how people were living in their Neolithic settlements.

Last artefact.

There's a few different ones here.

These are made out of flint again, the same kind of stone that we looked at in the first cutting tools.

And you see they've got them nice and sharp again, but they shaped them slightly differently, because they've got these little holes at the top, and that's because these are spear tips.

So these have been specially cut to put onto the end of a wooden stick, which is called a wooden shaft, and once they sharpen the flints, they fix the wooden shaft on, and then they got a spear, and they could use that for hunting.

So that tells us that when humans did go hunting, they would be using these spears.

They probably didn't want to get close to the animal.

It's too dangerous.

That's why they weren't using that axe.

But they would use the spears.

They would go out in groups and maybe team up so that they would ambush the animal.

Come from different directions, so the animal's got nowhere to run, and then all throw their spears at the same time from a safe distance so that they can kill an animal without ever being in danger.

And they would use these spears to do that.

So still stone, but it's sharpened flint, sharpened stone.

It wasn't just tools and weapons though.

Have a look at this artefact.

What do you think that this is? Well done if you said this is a necklace.

It could have been a bracelet, but it's a necklace.

So necklaces are made by shaping the stone and polishing it down.

And then you get these beautiful shapes that are all roughly the same size with a hole through the middle, so you can pass a bit of cord through it and make a necklace.

So this tells us that even early humans were making jewellery, they were making necklaces.

And they might have used this as a gift.

They might have used it to help bond socially, to make lots of friends.

It might have just been decorative, and back then, they still cared obviously about how they looked and wanted to decorate themselves.

Or it could show status, whether you're a chief or an important person in the tribe or in the little settlement.

These things could also have been used for trade as well.

So it might have been that one settlement wanted to swap something, there could be another nearby settlement that had lots of spears, and so they might make these, so they can take them and say, "Well look, we'll give you this necklace if you give us some spears." So it would have been the first chance to have some trade.

So we've got those spear tips, we've got the saddle quern, we've got the flint cutting tools, we've got that necklace, and we've got the jadeite axe, the axehead.

What I'd like you to do now is I'd like you to choose one of those artefacts, sketch it, and then annotate it.

That means label it with everything that it tells us about prehistoric Britain.

And I'll give you an example, 'cause I've done one.

I've chosen the necklace.

So I've sketched that in my book, and then I try and see what I can spot what this tells us.

Well, I spotted there's a little hole here, and that must have been created using another tool, so that tells me that early humans were really fantastic at creating, making little, using little tools to do some quite intricate work.

That means quite sort of detailed and difficult work.

So it's your turn now to choose any of the artefacts that you can see there, sketch them out, and annotate them in the same way that I did.

Pause the video and give that a go now.

Great work.

I'd love to see that work.

Remember, you can ask your parents or carers to share your work on social media if you'd like to so that everybody else can see it, and I'll also have a chance to spot it and look at your lovely work.

You just need to make sure that they put @OakNational in their message.

So that's the end of our lesson for today.

You've got a lovely annotated artefacts.

You studied lots of different artefacts and thought about the different materials that were used during prehistory that tell us a little bit about how early humans lived, how their living habits started to change, and how the tools can tell us a little bit about that.

Well done for your work in today's lesson.

I can't wait to see you in our next lesson on prehistoric Britain.

We'll be finding out even more about the farming methods that were used, and how humans started to farm, about different similarities and differences between the different periods, and everything else that we know about prehistoric Britain and the Stone Age.

I can't wait to see you there.