But the material evidence on which we base our knowledge of the Stone Age is fragmentary. “If we think about the Stone Age, we think about stone tools. Stone tools are what we can find in archaeological digs: they have survived, but so much of our past is perishable,” says Dr Victoria Bateman, author of Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.

That fragility matters. If many activities, especially those often carried out by women, left no lasting trace, the archaeological evidence for life in prehistory is bound to be skewed. Yet, Bateman stresses, a patchy record doesn’t mean we know nothing – and what we do now know paints a picture of a nuanced, varied and active life for women of the Stone Age.

Life on the Palaeolithic steppe

In Ice Age Europe, bands of hunter-gatherers followed herds across a cold steppe dotted with patches of woodland. Their camps were often temporary: circles of hide tents, or hearths dug into the ground.

Excavations at sites such as Dolní Věstonice in the Czech Republic or Mezhirich in Ukraine reveal the ingenuity of these communities. At Mezhirich, dwellings were built from mammoth bones, their interiors scattered with flint tools, ochre pigments and fragments of woven fibres.

• Read more | 8 little-known prehistoric sites in Britain

Life was harsh, and women were certainly not confined to passive roles. They crafted clothing from hides and sinew, stitched with bone needles, and their handiwork was essential to life in freezing conditions. They gathered plants, berries, roots and nuts – knowledge that required expert ecological awareness. And, as recent research shows, many also took part in the hunt.

The invisible work of women

“In early societies, so much of what was produced – whether it was baskets or fishing nets, or some of the earliest forms of clothing – has disintegrated with time. Women were heavily involved in manufacturing those perishable goods, but because they haven’t survived, I think we have, to an extent, really sidelined women’s contribution to these societies,” says Bateman.

• Read more | 7 things you (probably) didn’t know about Roman women

Occasionally, the past does leave a clue. At Pavlov in the Czech Republic, the imprint of a woven net survives on clay more than 25,000 years old. In waterlogged Mesolithic sites in Denmark, fragments of cord, fishing gear and wooden paddles provide glimpses of the vanished toolkit. Such finds emphasise how communities depended as much on fibres, textiles and nets as they did on stone spearheads.

Much of this labour was collaborative. Women likely taught daughters and sons how to spin fibres, twist cords or weave simple bags. The knowledge was generational and communal. Without it, the great hunts would have been impossible, because nets and ropes were as vital to trapping animals as spears.

The hunter–gatherer dichotomy

But who precisely were these hunters?

“When it comes to hunters, what does survive from the past are skeletons and the types of hunting equipment that they had with them. The long-standing assumption in archaeology was that if someone was buried with hunting tools then they must have been male,” Bateman explains.

This assumption reflected the mid-20th century world in which many archaeologists worked. The model of men as hunters by default neatly mirrored the roles seen across western societies at the time. In effect, modern gender norms were being projected back into deep history, creating a story of universal gender division that was simple to understand.

Recent decades of research have changed this thinking.

• Read more | Women in ancient Greece: what were their lives like?

“It’s only in the last couple of decades or so that archaeologists have begun using the latest DNA technology – more recently examining teeth – to find out that some hunters originally presumed male were actually female,” says Bateman.

The results have been striking. In the Andes, a 9,000-year-old burial at Wilamaya Patjxa, Peru – long assumed to be male because it contained a big-game hunting kit – was revealed by DNA to be female. Similar reassessments across North and South America suggest that up to 40 per cent of hunters were women, “all of whom had just been assumed to be men because the default assumption was: men were the hunters,” Bateman notes.

Together, these discoveries show that even with incomplete evidence, new tools can overturn old certainties. The ‘gatherer’ label obscures a more dynamic picture in which women shifted between roles, with labour shaped as much by immediate needs, environments and group size as by gender.

What life was really like for prehistoric women

So – what might a day in the life of a prehistoric woman have looked like?

Imagine a Mesolithic camp on the shores of a Scandinavian lake some 8,000 years ago. At dawn, women might have checked fish traps woven from willow, while others gathered berries in plaited baskets. By mid-morning, a group might have set out with bows and arrows to stalk red deer, children in tow. Later, hides might have been scraped clean with flint and sinew twisted into threads.

Archaeological evidence is what creates this picture. Preserved fish traps from Denmark’s Ertebølle culture show women’s weaving skills at work. Bone needles and tailored garments from Ice Age burials prove that clothing was carefully crafted, not crudely thrown together. Charred remnants in hearths show that plant foods were a crucial part of the diet, often gathered by women. Flint tools worn smooth from scraping hides speak of the endless labour of preparing clothing.

The archaeological record will always be partial, but science is bringing back long lost voices. Prehistoric life was diverse and improvised – with roles dictated by much more than gender.

Victoria Bateman was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

“For reasons that we're just beginning to glean, Britain cut itself off from the continent,” says archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. It was, he argues, “an absolutely ridiculous thing to have done.”

Why did they do it? And was it a Bronze Age Brexit?

The end of the Neolithic period

This was the tail end of the Neolithic period, an era characterised by settled farming, communal living, and the construction of some of the world’s most famous – and mysterious – architectural achievements.

On the continent, new ideas and materials were moving quickly through a complex network of trade and migration. The earliest signs of the Bronze Age – defined by the use of metal tools and weapons made by combining copper and tin – were already emerging.

• Read more | 8 little-known prehistoric sites in Britain

But in Britain, the Neolithic peoples – descendants of early farming migrants who had arrived around 4000 BC – stopped engaging with that continental momentum.

“They were not plugged into the exchange networks of the whole of Europe,” Parker Pearson explains. “Given that metallurgy was available, given that knowledge of the wheel was also there on the continent, they were just blocking off all these potential innovations.”

An early split from Europe

The archaeological record bears this out. Pottery styles, burial practices and architectural forms all diverge sharply from those seen across the channel.

“We can also see that there’s absolutely no traded material going either way across the channel,” he adds. “The traditions that developed in Britain were completely different, both in architectural [terms] and [in] small items like pottery.”

However, Parker Pearson doesn’t characterise this divergence as a rejection of progress. It was during this era that these communities produced some of the most iconic monuments in British and Irish history.

“It’s within that period of isolation that they built Stonehenge and other major stone circles,” Parker Pearson says, “as well as the big henge enclosures – circular, ditched and banked structures.” These are styles that are, he says, “entirely restricted to the islands of Britain and Ireland.”

These monuments are a hallmark of what’s known as Late Neolithic Britain and Ireland, a period marked by spiritual and ritual innovation rather than technological progress. Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire, and Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland are key examples, but there are more than 70 other ceremonial centres that became key locations for gatherings, ceremonies, and seasonal feasting.

• Read more | Visiting Avebury and Silbury Hill, the site of Neolithic Britons

But these were not urban or densely populated societies. “It’s a community that is also without villages,” Parker Pearson says. “We have just single farmsteads scattered across southern Britain, and there are key places – centres for ceremonial and monumental activity.”

Rather than staying in one place, these communities could travel. “People were not quite nomadic, but highly mobile,” he adds. “They were living in different places at different times of the year, moving with their animals – their cattle and their pigs – to be at the ceremonial centres for particular times of year, for feasting.”

Then, around 2500 BC, everything changed.

The Beaker takeover

The Beaker people, so named by historians and archaeologists after their distinctive bell-shaped pottery vessels, began to arrive from continental Europe around 2500 BC, bringing this era of isolation to an end.

They brought with them not only new technologies like metalworking and individual burial customs, but also different genetic lineages. Within a few centuries, they had largely replaced the native Neolithic population, in both cultural and biological terms.

“Within some 16 generations of the initial Beaker arrival, we’re seeing the very large replacement of the gene pool. The population – 400 years later, 16 generations later – they've really got only about 10% of that British farmers DNA in their genome.”

So, the Beakers’ arrival set Britain on a new course, bringing technologies that would tie Britain closer to the progress elsewhere in the world. But why had Britain withdrawn in the first place?

“We don’t have any idea,” Parker Pearson concedes. However, recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA analysis point to one potential cause: disease.

• Read more | How was Stonehenge built?

“One of the really interesting results we’re getting from DNA analysis is that we can see episodes of Bubonic Plague,” he says. The bacteria that cause plague, Yersinia pestis, can survive in ancient human remains, and has now been found in the teeth of people buried in Neolithic Britain.

“We know that there were at least two cases of Bubonic Plague in Britain,” he says. “One [occurred] before the Beaker people even arrived – around 2900–2800 BC, so about four centuries earlier. And then we’ve got a second event some 300 years after their initial arrival,” which can be seen in evidence “from burials in different parts of Britain”.

In both cases, the presence of plague raises questions about population movement.

• Read more | Your guide to the Black Death

“It is possible that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg there,” Parker Pearson explains, “and that the whole point about these large-scale migrations is that they act as a vector for the spreading of diseases across the whole continent.”

It’s possible, then, that Britain’s decision to isolate itself wasn’t purely social or economic. Fear of disease – and attempts to halt its spread – may have played a key role in severing links with the continent, centuries earlier.

This dramatic period of separation ended with the arrival of the Beaker people, who reconnected Britain with Europe and ushered in the Bronze Age proper. But for three centuries before that, Britain stood alone and independent – isolated and insular, but also culturally unique, innovative in other ways that echo to the present day.

Mike Parker Pearson was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

Paul Collins is the author of The Assyrians: Lost Civilizations (Reaktion, 2024).

• Buy it now from Amazon

Moudhy Al-Rashid is the author of Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (Hodder & Stoughton, 2025).

• Buy it now from Waterstones

Vicki Cummings is co-author of Stone Circles: A Field Guide (Yale University Press, 2024)

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• Buy now on Waterstones

Similarly, it was long thought Neanderthals were primarily European hominins. But, Wragg Sykes explains, we now also understand that they’re a Eurasian species, with an extremely wide geographical range. “They extended from Wales through to Siberia, central Asia and in the Near East,” she says.

• On the podcast | The Neanderthals: everything you wanted to know

In terms of when they existed, there’s evidence of proto-Neanderthals emerging 400,000 years ago. “But they only become clearly visible in fossil and archaeological terms around 350,000 years ago,” explains Wragg Sykes. “They appear to disappear from the archaeological record around 40,000 years ago – except their genes did continue, and they’re present in billions of people today.”

And why are they so significant? “Neanderthals were the first hominins that we realised were hominins,” she explains. “They’ve been with us for 160 years, all the way through the development of human evolutionary science, so they give a really interesting case study for how our ideas change, how the methods that we use to investigate them have completely transformed as well.”

Neanderthal facts: 7 things you need to know according to Dr Wragg Sykes

Neanderthals were not ‘missing links’

When they were discovered more than 160 years ago, Neanderthals blew everyone’s minds. The ideas of 19th-century naturalists Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin about natural selection weren’t yet published, and the notion that humans had ancient, vanished relations was scarcely imaginable.

While the first Neanderthal fossils were compared with apes, biologists of the time like Thomas Huxley could see how much more similar they were to humans. In fact, the Neanderthal lineage only split from our shared common ancestor around 600 Ka (thousand years ago): vastly more recent than the oldest known stone tools, over 3 million years ago.

Neanderthals were not hyper-carnivores

Early theories that Neanderthals weren’t great hunters, or were stuck in a ‘Big Game Rut’, have been steadily overturned. Existing through 300,000 years of climate cycles and across western Eurasia, they adapted to a wide variety of environments and took the best of what was around them.

• On the podcast| British prehistory: everything you wanted to know

This included hunting steppe-tundra megafauna like mammoth and woolly rhino, tracking medium-sized game like deer through woods, plus smaller species like birds, rabbits, tortoises or rockpooling for fish and crustaceans. But plants were also on the menu, from tubers like waterlily roots to seeds and fruits, some of which needed cooking.

Neanderthals could innovate

Images of Neanderthals as technologically unsophisticated abound, and it’s been claimed their culture barely changed through hundreds of millennia. Yet they mastered many methods for taking apart stone, with varied cultures found in different regions, and there’s also evidence of innovation through time.

Blades were once thought to define H. sapiens, but Neanderthals were perfectly capable of making them too. They produced adhesives for multi-part tools, including birch tar – the first synthetic substance – and a recipe mixing pine resin and beeswax.

Neanderthals also had carpentry skills, shown by finely carved spears and digging sticks, and even made shell tools.

Neanderthals could talk

‘Ugg’ boots might still be fashionable, but the grunting caveman clichés are now outdated. Anatomical evidence suggests Neanderthals had vocal capabilities not so different to our own. Their voice boxes could make largely similar sounds, and strikingly, their inner ears were tuned into the same frequencies as ours: human speech.

• Read more | Why did Neanderthals go extinct?

However, genetics suggest subtle differences. While sharing the language-linked FOXP2 gene, a protein difference means theirs didn’t function identically.

What might they have talked about? Perhaps animal and plant lore, knowledge of stone and seasons, or sharing memories. Woven together, these may have become the first hearthside tales.

Neanderthals were not brutish

Long presented as primitive and savage, in fact the assumption that Neanderthals were by nature aggressive is not reflected in the archaeology. Hunting of big game, especially herds, must have been collaborative, and the spoils were systematically butchered and transported elsewhere to waiting mouths.

Other clues come from their living sites: hearths were the centres of ‘home’, and in some places we can see groups were sharing resources between different fires.

Rather than violent chimpanzees, this better matches our other closest primate relatives, bonobos. Their lives revolve around female friendships, and groups are far more open to meeting strangers.

Neanderthals had aesthetics

Did Neanderthal life stretch beyond bare concerns of survival, into stories, songs or art? There’s growing evidence of an aesthetic sense.

• Read more | 5 key facts about prehistoric cave art

This includes carefully incised lines on bones with no practical explanation, and collecting unusual materials: a fossil shell in Italy was smeared with red ochre 45 Ka, as was a geode in Romania around the same age. In Spain, pigment mixes are known: yellow and red minerals with sparkly ‘fools’ gold’. Plus, linked to their broad interest in birds’ feathers and claws, traces of another pigment recipe were recently found on an eagle talon from a Croatian site dating over 100 Ka.

Neanderthals are not extinct

Perhaps the greatest revolution in understanding of Neanderthals is that they did not entirely vanish. Older models envisioning H. sapiens replacing Neanderthals around 40,000 years ago were overturned in 2010 by genetic evidence showing interbreeding. A decade on, things are more complicated. H. sapiens were in Eurasia well before then – Australia by 65 Ka, China at least 80 Ka, and the Near East at 180 Ka – and new DNA samples reveal multiple phases of interbreeding going back before 200 Ka.

Most living people have a Neanderthal genetic legacy, and in that sense they’re less extinct than some of the earliest H. sapiens populations.

Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes is a Palaeolithic archaeologist, the author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, and co-founder of Trowelblazers

As well as the fact that Neanderthals are our closest genetic relatives (with both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals sharing their last common ancestor) the current consensus firmly suggests that Neanderthals were a diverse, complicated culture who inhabited vast regions of the planet. They left behind cave and rock art, burials, tools, and – crucially – traces of their DNA that persists in today’s human population.

Still, extensive academic debate among archaeologists persists on this topic. And, in regard to the question of why – and when – Neanderthals were driven to extinction, an uncertainty lingers.

When did Neanderthals go extinct?

Neanderthal extinction is thought to have occurred within an approximate window of 40,000 years ago, but the definitive date will always be elusive.

Archaeologists have settled on this timeframe by using radiocarbon dating on various Neanderthal tools and remains.

These are in locations scattered across Europe and Asia including Shanidar cave in Iraq, Vindija cave in Croatia, Simanya cave in Spain, and Gorham’s cave in Gibraltar, where physical evidence of Neanderthal life has been dated to as recently as 42,000 years ago.

Out of all the evidence that has been radiocarbon dated, almost none is proven to be more recent than this 40,000-year age (while plenty predates it).

This suggests that, with our current understanding, the period was a point of significant and serious population decline, if not outright extinction.

One caveat to this conclusion is that archaeologists may yet find evidence of Neanderthal populations existing more recently than 40 millennia ago – perhaps in small, isolated pockets and communities, which would reshape our understanding of their extinction. But, despite extensive searching for such evidence, none has yet been found.

• On the podcast | The Neanderthals: everything you wanted to know

Another caveat is whether it’s correct to consider Neanderthals extinct at all. British palaeolithic archaeologist Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes argues that due to Neanderthal/Homo sapiens interbreeding, “most living people have a Neanderthal genetic legacy.” By extension, she draws the conclusion that Neanderthals are still with us today.

How and why did Neanderthals go extinct?

While archaeologists haven’t agreed conclusively on the definitive reason for Neanderthals’ extinction, current research supports the idea that it was due to a range of factors.

• Read more | 5 key facts about prehistoric cave art

These fit into two categories that may have played a significant role: competition with modern humans, and changes in the environment.

Did Neanderthals go extinct because of competition with Homo sapiens?

The belief that Neanderthals were in part made extinct due to contact with modern humans lacks direct evidence, but is firmly held by many archaeologists.

A crucial piece of the puzzle is that the apparent extinction of Neanderthals 40,000 years ago aligns with the movement of Homo sapiens into areas of Neanderthal inhabitation.

The idea of Homo sapiens – modern humans – and Neanderthals interacting is not just a supposition: we know that such interactions did occur, because the presence of Neanderthal DNA in our genome today proves that interbreeding between the populations took place.

• Read more | 8 little-known prehistoric sites in Britain

As Homo sapiens moved into formerly Neanderthal territory, did these interactions turn violent, and did the modern humans win these fights, ultimately leading to Neanderthal extinction? The answer to this question isn’t clear, as there is no unequivocal evidence of physical conflict between them.

Still, as Homo sapiens populations expanded into Neanderthal areas, it isn’t too difficult to imagine friction arising between groups, stemming from competition for vital resources like food and shelter.

One theory suggests that Homo sapiens killed their Neanderthal siblings unwittingly, by spreading into Neanderthal territory carrying diseases that the Neanderthal immune system had never been exposed to.

Another, put forward in a 2022 paper, suggests that Neanderthals could have been erased by sex, rather than disease or war. “This behaviour could have led to the Neanderthals' extinction if they were regularly breeding with Homo sapiens, which could have eroded their population until they disappeared,” explains Professor Chris Stringer in the paper.

Did Neanderthals go extinct because of environmental shifts?

Whether it’s asteroid impact, or changing global temperatures, changes in the environment have been the leading cause of extinction throughout natural history. It might have also been an integral factor in the demise of the Neanderthals.

Neanderthals lived during the last Ice Age. This was a period marked by dramatic oscillation between cold and warmer glacial periods, and archaeological analysis shows particularly harsh cold snaps may have coincided with Neanderthal population decline.

• On the podcast| British prehistory: everything you wanted to know

These events will have caused significant changes in the availability of vegetation, transforming the open woodlands Neanderthals favoured into less hospitable environments. This shift would have significantly impacted the populations of large herbivores – including mammoths and woolly rhinos – that were a mainstay of the Neanderthal diet.

Faced with rapidly shifting landscapes and the changing availability of essential resources, Neanderthals might have struggled to adapt, leading to dwindling populations and the knock-on effects of that.

Dovetailing with encroaching competition from Homo sapiens, the changing climate seems likely to have imposed the fate of extinction on Neanderthals, which left us as the final human species on the planet.

Whether or not one of these factors played a bigger role than another remains disputed. However, it brings researchers closer to understanding the truth behind when, why, and how Neanderthals ultimately faced extinction.