Technology
The Neolithic people of Northwestern Europe built long houses and elaborate tombs for their dead. These tombs are particularly numerous in Ireland, where there are many thousand still in existence. Neolithic people in the British Isles built long barrows and chamber tombs for their dead and constructed causewayed camps, henges flint mines and cursus monuments.
With very minor exceptions (a few copper hatchets and spear heads in the Great Lakes region) the peoples of the Americas and the Pacific remained at the neolithic level of technology up until the time of the European contacts. Technological complexity does not correlate with social complexity. A glance at such cultures as the Iroquois, Pueblo people, Maya civilization and the Maori shows that a culture may be highly socially and politically sophisticated in many ways without knowledge of the use of metals.
Neolithic settlements include:
Jericho in the Levant, Neolithic from around 8350 BC, arising from the earlier Epipaleolithic Natufian culture.
- Çatalhöyük in Turkey, 7500 BC
- Mehrgarh in South Asia, 7000 BC
- Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, ca. 9000 BC.
- Nevali Cori in Turkey, ca. 8000 BC.
- Knap of Howar and Skara Brae, the Orkney Islands, Scotland, from 3500 BC.
- around 2000 settlements of Trypillian culture, 5400 BC -- 2800 BC
The World's oldest known engineered roadway, the Sweet Track in England also dates from this period.
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Neolithic"