The Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic) period in England was well underway by 9,000BC.
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The climate became steadily warmer as the Ice Age ended (the Holocene period starts at 10,000BC).
The large, cold, open spaces that suited herds of reindeer and wild horses gradually turned into temperate birch forests more suitable for wild cattle (aurochs), red deer and wild pigs. Mammoths and woolly rhinos became extinct. Sea levels rose enough to separate Ireland from Great Britain by around 11,000BC, before the ecosystem had changed to the warmer version, which is why there are no native snakes in Ireland - they had not recolonised that far west before the land was cut off.
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Rock art in Europe changed from large pictures of animals inside caves to smaller scenes of people on exposed rock walls outside.
The bow-and-arrow and barbed fishing harpoon were invented, making hunting more efficient.
Air-dried pottery was invented - clay was shaped by hand and painted to make containers and small models, but it was not yet baked in a fire or kiln.
Although still hunter-gatherers, it is likely that people began to be semi-settled, moving between regular campsites to follow the seasonal pattern of available food. Like people following a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the modern world, these Mesolithic people would have worked together with a detailed understanding of the resources around them to provide themselves with food, shelter, medical care, companionship and long-distance trade networks, as well as leisure time for looking good, storytelling, music, art, relaxation and religious festivals.
People had relatively few possessions as everything had to be carried between camps by hand or using a raft/canoe, or made where it would be used, left, and made again new at the next campsite. Only natural materials like stone, wood, clay, chalk, ochre, amber, thorns, reeds, moss, bark, soot, salt, shell, feather, bone, antler, fur and leather were available.
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From 6,000BC
As sea levels continued to rise, Great Britain was physically cut off from the rest of Europe with the final flooding of the land bridge Doggerland to create the English Channel.
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Despite this, world-changing new ideas and technologies were being brought into the country from continental Europe, having been gradually spreading west from the Near East for thousands of years.
The introduction of farming had a huge impact on every aspect of life - it provided new foods (but a much narrower diet) based on domesticated animals and grain plants, it required a new settled lifestyle to tend the crops, and needed new processing techniques and tools (like grinding flour and weaving wool) to use what was created,
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The Stone Age hunter gatherers gave up much of their leisure time and exposed themselves to a more unhealthy daily lifestyle in exchange for the ability to create their own food and to take control of their environment. Although farming offers the illusion of food security, it also left farming communities vulnerable to famine in years of bad harvests or livestock disease. Living with domestic animals and birds may also have allowed some of their flu-like diseases to jump to humans.
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