BRITISH FARMHOUSE 'OLDER THAN PYRAMIDS'

by Auslan Cramb
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH Friday, September 7, 2001 - British Farmhouse

A FARMHOUSE built 1,000 years before the pyramids, with living rooms, bedrooms and a kitchen, has been found in a Scottish cornfield.

Archaeologists say the 6,000-year-old structure suggests that Neolithic people were “engineers as skilled and intelligent as the modern man.”

University researchers unearthed the farm while examining Auchenlaich, the longest Stone Age burial cairn in Britain, near Callander, Perthshire.

The building is more than 80ft long and 30ft wide, with walls made from massive timber posts, and split into separate compartments by light wooden partitions.

Dr Gordon Barclay, of Stirling University, said: “There is nothing like it anywhere else in Europe. It is an enormous, very sophisticated piece of engineering, built to last.”

Because there were no metal nails, the house was made almost entirely from timber shaped to fit together with timber pegs.

Dr Barclay said: “They had cattle, pigs and sheep as well as cereals such as wheat and barley. Their tools, such as fine polished axes, were made from stone which they would have quarried nearby.”

Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia