The Mesolithic period was, until fairly recently, considered a stagnant period for humankind. Wedged between the glorious advances of the Upper Paleolithic—think of those fabulous cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira caves—and the busy Neolithic period, when farming reconstituted human diets and lives, the Mesolithic lifestyle was thought of nothing more than hunter gatherers with shell middens.
Reconstructed Mesolithic Settlement from Archeon 2007. Photo by Hans Splinter
But that changed in the last couple of decades, as archaeological investigations increased outside of Europe, climatic studies were developed, and DNA evidence concerning the introduction of agriculture and the Neolithic out of the Fertile Crescent were studied in earnest.
Today the Mesolithic is seen as a very difficult period, where human occupations struggled with extremes in climate change, reinvented their subsistence strategy, and built the first megalithic monuments.
Comments
I’ve always thought of the mesolithic period as the ‘time of heroes’: modern and yet archaic megafauna, all of nature unbroken and pacing, still possibly populated by small remants of other human species living in remote ‘islands’ whether actual or defacto, in a changeable world, that was about to change even more.