Neolithic literally means the ‘New Stone Age’, i.e. the final part of the Stone Age, the period generally associated with a basic change from hunting and gathering to farming: people now began settling down in villages, cultivating crops, keeping domestic livestock, and making and using pottery and stone tools, but with as yet no usage of metal. The dating of the Neolithic is quite variable, beginning in the Near East around 8000 BC and lasting into the 2nd millennium BC in northern Europe — Dr Paul Bahn