iver valleys - people started to settle, domesticate wheat, barley, goats, sheep, cattle and pigs. They started to farm for the very first time. This was the Neolithic Revolution. The first fired ceramics - pottery was added to the recipe, along with polished stone tools. Eventually these populations also absorbed the very first metallurgy, literacy, and town building - falling into the southern half of those river valleys in Mesopotamia.

Image above - Standing Stone at Stillaig, Argyll, Scotland.

From the Levant and Anatolia, both along the Mediterranean, and direct across the Balkans by land, Neolithic culture and farming technology spread westwards and northwards across Europe. Population genetics now tells us that this WAS carried by people. It was not just a transfer of culture and artifacts. DNA from South-West Asia was strongly carried across Europe. The Neolithic farmers were a people, with roots in the Near East.

What happened to the old European hunter-foragers? It seems a mixture of displacement and admixture. As the Neolithic Revolution rolled across Europe, it did pick up some hunter-gatherer DNA. However, few of the male haplogroups. By the time that the First Farmers reached the British Isles, they would have had an ancestry mixed between Near East Asian and European hunters. Without a doubt, brides and perhaps slaves were taken along that long route from Anatolia to Britain. This pattern perhaps continued when they reached the Irish and British Isles, and confronted some of the last hunter-gatherer populations of North West Europe.

Image above. Ring of Brodgar, Orkney.

All of this was fine. The British Isles were settled by Neolithic peoples around 4,100 BC. I've seen many of their monuments, studied excavation reports of their archaeological sites, and held many of their flint artifacts. It was a dominant culture here for two thousand years. Religious systems may have come and go. They erected so many monuments here that still survive. Causewayed enclosures, long barrows, cursuses, henges, m