The new culture spread slowly at first

From the June 11th, 2011 edition of The Economist, The Neolithic Boom-Time Machine. Reports on a new technique for dating archaeological remains to a much narrower and accurate time range than is currently possible. With the more precise dates, a new understanding of sequence of events and possible cause and effect are emerging. Pretty neat.

Agriculture seems to have arrived fully formed in what is now Kent, in the south-east, around 4050BC. The new culture spread slowly at first, taking 200 years to reach modern-day Cheltenham, in the west, but over the following five decades it penetrated as far north as Aberdeen. Soon afterwards, causewayed enclosures (circular arrangements of banks and ditches hundreds of metres across—see picture) began springing up all over the country.