Let's explore the Stone Age
This collection contains curriculum relevant videos, quizzes and games to help Years 3/4 and P4/5 History students with:
knowledge of everyday life in the Stone Age
a timeline of prehistoric Britain
These educational resources are hand-picked from BBC Bitesize and the wider BBC.
Get started
Here you will find videos and activities about the Stone Age. Try them out, and then test your knowledge with a short quiz before exploring the rest of the collection.
Take a trip through 900,000 years of prehistoric history.
Narrator: Excuse me. Yes, you. Ever wondered what prehistoric Britain was like? Great! Well let’s start at the beginning.The ancestors of humans first appeared in Britain around 900,000 years ago.
Here is one of them. I would like to introduce you to your great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great……great, great, great, great, great… grandfather.
Don’t worry about that, he’s just saying pleased to meet you. These early Britons were hunter-gatherers. They used flint tools to hunt animals, like deer and mammoths.
And it got cold. Really cold, for a long time. Can you guess what it was called? No idea? It’s quite obvious… Ok, I’ll tell you… The Ice Age!
Then it was warm. Then hot. Then cold again. Once that was out of the way humans discovered farming and began to settle down in villages. This all happened during the… during the Stone Age… excuse me… stop!
Sorry, but we must get on to the Bronze Age.
It’s called the Bronze Age because people discovered how to use metals like bronze for the first time.
Welcome to the Iron Age! You’ve upgraded. People used iron in the Iron Age because it was easier to find and knock into shape. Ah, Celtic warriors. Don’t they look fierce!
The prehistoric period ended when the Romans arrived, who brought us roads and indoor plumbing.
Well, there we go, hundreds of thousands of years in a matter of minutes. Did you enjoy that? Fantastic! Me too.
Sorry, history can sometimes get a bit messy.
Exploring
Explore the interactive image below to find out what footprints, bones and tools can tell us about prehistoric people.
In the early Stone Age, people made simple hand-axes out of stones. They made hammers from bones or antlers and they sharpened sticks to use as hunting spears.
Watch the video to see how these were made.
Raksha Dave finds out how our ancient ancestors made tools and weapons from flint.
[BLEATING]
RAKSHA DAVE: A very long time ago, in ancient Britain, there were no written words. This was the time before history was recorded. It's prehistory. The only clues to life back then come from the objects, burials, cave paintings and monuments, which speak to us about Britain's ancient past.
My name is Raksha Dave, I'm an archaeologist and I'm in search of Britain's Ancient Voices. My job as an archaeologist means I spend a lot of my time searching for clues about ancient Britain.And sometimes, if I'm lucky, I get to find something like this. You might be mistaken for thinking that this is just a lump of rock, but in fact it's a very carefully-shaped tool called a hand axe, made out of flint.
These tools were made a very, very long time ago — over 10,000 years ago, in what we now call the Stone Age. And to show how long ago that is, I'm going to walk back in time. This is today.
Imagine that every step I took was equal to 100 years, then to go back to the Stone Age, I'd have to take 100 steps.This could take quite a while.One, two, three, four, five…
After taking 20 steps, I've gone back 2,000 years. This is the first time that history was written down, and now I'm going back into prehistory.
And 100 steps back in time is 10,000 years ago. This is the Stone Age. Britain looked very different back then.There was no internet, there were no houses that were built out of brick, no cars, there wasn't even any metal.
Just thick, dark forests with animals hiding in them, so Stone Age people needed sharp, strong tools to cut trees down and to hunt the animals for food. And this is where a stone called flint came in. There's a real skill to making tools out of flint.
IAN DENNIS: A Stone Age man could work these fantastically into all sorts of tools to do with everyday life.
First thing we would do is take a small piece of flint, and if you want to take a flake off like this — as you can see one's come off here — you would hit it with a stone, what we call the hammerstone. So you aim and you'll strike here and you'll get a little flake, OK?
RAKSHA: So I hold it like this?
IAN: Tight.
RAKSHA:And then I need to aim for — is it this bit here?
IAN: Yeah, just on the ridge there.
RAKSHA:OK.
IAN: That's it. That's it. There you go. Sounded quite good to me!
RAKSHA: Oh!
IAN: There you go. One little flake.
RAKSHA: Excellent. So this is actually really skilled work, this.
IAN: Yes, the people in the Stone Age, they knew everything about how to strike that flint off.
RAKSHA: The flakes that we've actually managed to knock off — they're actually really sharp, aren't they?
IAN:They are indeed, and we can actually drag a piece of flint…
RAKSHA: Wow!
IAN:…straight through.Once you've knocked off all your flakes, you can make a nice arrow.
RAKSHA: They look rather deadly, but what I'm wondering is how do you actually stick these pieces on? Is this Stone Age glue?
IAN: It is a Stone Age glue and it's actually made from pine resin and beeswax, mixed with a bit of charcoal. And this would be very effective at killing the deer to bring home your dinner for your family or your tribe.
RAKSHA: So, hang on, that would kill a large deer?
IAN: Easily.
RAKSHA: That's pretty impressive.
IAN: Easily.
RAKSHA: Animals were very important to Stone Age people — and not just for food. Their skins were used for clothes, bags, and their bones were particularly useful for small things like tools, jewellery and even instruments. But none of this would've been possible without the people who made tools out of stone.
Explore this interactive picture, and try the quiz below to see what you know about the Stone Age.
Teaching resources
There are more teaching resources available on the Stone Age on BBC Bitesize for Teachers, like these short animated films that show the story of Britain - from the Mesolithic Stone Age through to Magna Carta.
BBC Bitesize for Teachers has thousands of free, curriculum-linked resources to help deliver lessons - all arranged by subject and age group.
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