Archaeologists have discovered Britain’s oldest house. I know, it doesn’t seem on the surface to be a terribly interesting story, but there’s lots going on there, so bear with me here. I saw it on Science Daily, and thought it was worth passing on.

The house dates back to 8500 BC, which makes it half a millenium older than the previous oldest house in Britain, and it sounds a lot like how people would have lived for many, many years to come. The evidence suggests that this might not have been an isolated house, but a part of a community of many. That’s pretty wild to think about. That’s potentially an early prototype for a city dating back more than ten thousand years.

And they had puppies!

Actually, the domestication of dogs would have been in full swing at that point. As I learned recently in this fascinating Neurologica post, we’ve been shacking up with dogs for about 14,000 years. The article’s an interesting one that talks about how the domestication of dogs was an integral part of our recent evolution.

I find the whole thing quite interesting. We talk about recorded history and how it doesn’t go back that terribly far, but archaeologists are finding some fantastic things like this house that may well serve us just as well. We won’t have any idea about the specifics of the lives of these early humans, but we can tell a lot about where they had come from and what sorts of social and survival traits they had developed. For example, the article states that they weren’t agrarian per se, but “the inhabitants did burn part of the landscape to encourage animals to eat shoots”.

Jim