Mesolithic

The key invention of the age is the bow and arrow. Microliths appeared: small stone inserts set into a bone or wooden base. Harpoons, hooks and nets were made the same way.

Microliths are a change of thinking as much as of technique. Instead of shaping one perfect blade, you make many small standard pieces and combine them — and when one breaks, you replace that piece rather than the whole tool.

Camps stood by rivers, lakes and sea shores. Dugout boats appeared, along with the first domestic animal — the dog, a helper in the hunt.

Water changed the arithmetic of settlement. Fish and shellfish come back to the same place season after season, so a camp by a good shore could be returned to year on year — a step toward staying put, taken long before farming.

Images grew simpler and smaller, but people appeared in them far more often: hunting scenes, dances, boats. Open-air rock painting and fine bone carving appeared.

That shift is striking. Palaeolithic walls are full of animals and almost empty of people; here the human figure moves to the centre, usually in a group and usually doing something together.

The first cemeteries appeared — permanent burial grounds beside the camp. Graves hold ornaments of teeth and shells, and the body was sometimes sprinkled with red pigment.

A cemetery implies a place worth returning to, and a claim on it. Burying generations in one spot ties a group to a stretch of land in a way that carrying the dead with you never could.

A large share of Mesolithic life happened on coastlines that are now under water. Sea levels rose as the ice melted, and the best camps — the ones by the shore — went first. The map is missing its richest sites by definition.