The change from a hunter-gatherer to farming way of life is what defines the start of the neolithic age.
Newcastle University researchers have called for urgent action to protect the Neolithic and Bronze Age carvings.
John Sheriff, an investigator with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland, said it was impossible to date the stone precisely but it is very likely to be neolithic or Bronze Age, and could "easily" be 4, 000 years old.
The remains investigated here span 3, 500 years of European prehistory, from the Early Neolithic to the Bronze Age.
It all depends on whether Mr Hobsbawm can fit a topic into his grand preoccupation with the topic of how humanity got from the neolithic to the nuclear age.
Their monuments survive, but their houses (rare exceptions aside, particularly in Orkney) are lost to us, so in the later Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age, these henges and stones circles seem to have been the prime concerns of the people who built them.
By the end of 2005 they had some 300 items - from the Neolithic Era, the Bronze Age, the Roman period and medieval times.
Some, including a committee of experts, thought the site was certainly Neolithic, though with a baffling admixture of Iron Age, Roman and medieval remains.
At the foot of the red rock, there are remains dating back thousands of years: a Romano-Celtic temple, Bronze Age walls and structures built as long ago as the Neolithic period.
Nevertheless, stone circles and henges do appear to be connected parts of a tradition that developed in Britain from around 3000 to 2000 BC - in other words, during the later Neolithic period (when agriculture began here) and moving into the earlier Bronze Age (when we see the first use of metals, from about 2400 BC).
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