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This concluding chapter does not aim to be a magisterial overview or a comprehensive summary. The preceding chapters speak for themselves of the range and quality of research currently being carried out across north-west Europe relevant to the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition. Instead, the chapter offers some brief, personal reflections on what we are doing well and what we could still do better, and thus tries to define some of the continuing challenges for future research.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the significance of the transition from hunter-gatherer existence to farming society. It raises the following question: What if we started with the radical premise that most or all societies in the post-glacial period – whatever their subsistence or technological base – were normally in a state of transformation, which would offer a quite different perspective on the holy grail of finding moments of Mesolithic–Neolithic transition? The chapter then sets out the focus of the book, namely the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition in north-west Europe.

This chapter reviews the development of agriculture in Britain and Ireland from the Neolithic period to the middle of the Bronze Age (approximately 4000 to 1500 bc in calendar years), and the associated questions of the identity of the people involved, the density of populations, and their effect on the landscape. This brief account is set in the context of the wider development of an agricultural way of life on the adjacent continental mainland, going as far back as 6000 bc in central Europe. I hope to raise questions as much as to answer them, and to concentrate wherever possible on new evidence and approaches. I should like to frame my discussion by setting out four hypotheses: 1. Overall, change was slow, but punctuated by spurts or accelerations (notably around 5500 bc, 4000 bc, and 1500 bc), whose nature is still poorly understood. This hypothesis stands in opposition to a general tendency to envisage a steadily intensifying evolution of subsistence methods, population levels, and landscapes. 2. There was much continuity of population both in continental Europe and in Britain and Ireland, but the role of colonization still needs seriously to be considered. This hypothesis seeks to re-examine both the assumption in continental research of major colonization with the onset of the Neolithic and the recent British consensus that the beginnings of the Neolithic were essentially to do with the acculturation of an indigenous population. 3. Although some landscapes had been cleared of substantial tracts of woodland by about 2500–2000 bc, population levels in most parts of Britain and Ireland remained relatively low at least until the middle of the Bronze Age, and the lifestyle can be characterized by continuing mobility and/or short-term sedentism. This hypothesis restates recent opposition to the notion that the introduction of agriculture entailed sedentary existence, rapidly growing population, and intensifying production right from the start. The coming of agriculture in a more familiar guise, although preceded in Britain and Ireland by herding and piecemeal cultivation from about 4000 bc, was not seen till as late as about 1500 bc onwards.

Our understanding of the first peopling of Britain has recently undergone a transformation. On the one hand there have been fundamental advances in the investigation of Pleistocene environments and chronology, while on the other exceptionally well preserved archaeological sites of the period have now been investigated. These data are allowing us to reinterpret the society and palaeo-ecology of the people who inhabited this small corner of north-west Europe between 500,000 and 35,000 years ago. In order to put these findings into their proper context I will, however, need to roam more widely across the Palaeolithic world and consider the evolutionary changes and geographical processes that were involved over such long time-spans. One aspect I will concentrate upon in this contribution is that, although these earliest inhabitants did not dramatically transform the landscape, in the manner that either prehistoric farmers did with fields and ritual monuments (see Whittle in this volume) or, later, more complex societies achieved through trade, cities and the military machine (see Cunliffe and Härke in this volume), we can, none the less, see the beginnings of such shaping in the way they went about their daily and lifetime routines. My point is that these early hominids (a term which includes ourselves and all our fossil ancestors) were not slaves to nature, ecological creatures determined in everything by the environment, but rather creative builders of social networks that linked their daily landscapes of habit into very different social worlds. Their act of living in the worlds of half a million years ago was every bit as transformative for those environments as our acts of living are today. In other words, the idea that our earliest ancestors lived solely in a natural landscape because they had very simple technologies, smaller brains, and tiny social groupings, while we by contrast create and inhabit a complex cultural world, needs to be revised. Moreover, the second theme of this volume, population diversity and movement, is also illustrated in these early beginnings.