Urgent and masterful ashore,
  Man dreams and plans,
      And more and more,
  As ages slip away, Earth shows
  How need by satisfaction grows,
  And more and more its patient face
  Mirrors the driving human race.

Edward Sandford Martin.

THE NEOLITHIC OR NEW STONE AGE
    Succeeded the Old Stone Age and overlapped the Bronze Age.

THE BRONZE AGE
    Succeeded the New Stone Age and overlapped the Early Iron
    Age.

THE EARLY IRON AGE
    Succeeded the Bronze Age and continued in Britain until the
    Roman Invasion in B.C. 54.

(All these periods overlapped.)

The Palaeolithic men had reached England when it was part of the continent of Europe, but after the lesser Glacial Period had driven the hairy savages southwards a slow earth movement produced what is now the English Channel and Britain was isolated.  Gradually the cold relaxed and vegetation once more became luxuriant, great forests appeared and England was again joined to the continent.  Possibly the more genial climate which began to prevail in this country and the northward movement of the reindeer brought the first Neolithic men into England, and it has been suggested that some of these earlier tribes whose implements have been discovered in White Park Bay, County Antrim and the MacArthur Cave, near Oban, form a link between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic people.

The culture of the New Stone Age was a huge advance upon that of the earlier races, although it is more than probable that the higher development existed in different parts of the world simultaneously with the lower, the more primitive people becoming influenced by the more advanced.  A wave of great progress came with the Iberians of Spain who spread across France and reached Britain by means of boats at a time when it was probably once more an island.

Armed with bows and arrows and carefully finished stone axes and spears, clothed in skins and wearing ornaments of curious coloured stones or pieces of bone threaded on thin leathern cords, these Iberians or Neolithic men gradually spread all over the British Islands.  They evidently liked the hills overlooking the fresh waters of Lake Pickering for their remains have been found there in considerable quantities.

The hills on all sides of the Vale are studded with barrows from which great quantities of burial urns and skeletons have been exhumed, and wherever the land is under cultivation the plough exposes flint arrow and spear-heads and stone axes.