The Stone Ages
The Old Stone Age - Palaeolithic (approx 700,000 – 8,000 BC)
This immense span of time covers at least two ice ages during which few, if any, humans lived in what is now southern Britain. During the intervening warmer periods, bands of nomadic hunters passed through our area leaving behind some of their stone tools, such as the Acheulian handaxe found at Kingsley. This form of axe was used by a type of hominid known as Homo heidelbergensis whose fragmentary remains have been found elsewhere in England. These people were hunting animals such as deer, horse, boar, elephant and even, during some warmer periods, hippopotamus.
At around 300,000 years ago there is evidence for the presence of Neanderthals in the general area as remains of their characteristic stone tools have been found just to the north in the river terrace gravels at Farnham.
By about 30,000 years ago the first modern humans enter southern Britain, crossing from France at a time when the English Channel was still dry land. Their more sophisticated stone toolkit included flint arrowheads, scrapers, burins, blades and many other types of specialist implement, examples of which have been found just north of our area. The period was one of extreme cold with the glaciers reaching their maximum extent at around 10,000 years ago when the Whitehill/Bordon area was just south of the main ice sheets. Pollen samples taken locally show that the vegetation was similar to northern Finland today with a covering of dwarf bilberry, dwarf birch and various grasses. Finds of the bones, tusks and teeth of mammoths, woolly rhinos and musk ox are surprisingly common from local gravel pits, particularly those along the river Wey around Farnham
The Middle Stone Age - Mesolithic (8,000 – 4,000 BC)
As the glaciers melted, the climate warmed rapidly and the vegetation changed from open Arctic tundra to forest cover. Into this new environment came many of the animals we know today such as red deer, roe deer and wild pig as well as some that have become extinct in Britain such as wild cattle, bears, wolves and so on. Following these herds came the hunter-gatherers of the Middle Stone Age, many of whose camp sites have been found locally. These sites, which must have been used year after year, can be located by the large numbers of flint tools and waste flakes such as those found at Oakhanger.
The changed habitat is reflected in a change in tool types used by these hunters. No longer needing large handaxes, a typical Middle Stone Age toolkit consisted of smaller flint flakes used as barbs on arrows, for saw teeth, for piercing skins, as well as scrapers, burins and a type of axe known as a tranchet. These types of tools are amongst the commonest finds from the heathlands in the Whitehill/Bordon area.
The New Stone Age - Neolithic (4,000–2,200 BC)
This is the period of the first farmers when the wild forest that had developed since the melting of the glaciers began to be cut down. Initially, rather like 'slash and burn' agriculture in the Amazon today, humans had little impact on the environment. By the later Neolithic, however, parts of the country were becoming cleared and great earth monuments were being erected, such as the long barrow found at Badshot Lea, near Farnham. In the Bordon/Whitehill area a number of stone implements have been found including leaf-shaped arrowheads and polished flint axes, which indicate the presence of farmers at this period.
Palaeolithic "Acheulian" handaxe found at Kingsley
The Warren – nationally important Mesolithic site
including 2,900 flint implements. 85,000 by-products and nearly 4,000 blades.
Two Thames picks (flint axes) – found at the Deadwater LNR and Hollywater on opposite sides of the R. Deadwater
Polished Flint Axe found on Longmoor ranges
