Around 8000 years ago as Britain was becoming the island that we recognise today the earliest people living here were hunter-gatherers in what is known as the Mesolithic period. Evidence for where they lived is widespread in Britain and many sites have been archaeologically excavated. However, good surviving evidence for how these people lived is restricted to a very few sites. The common view has been that they were scattered nomadic people who lived in small groups with little evidence for them building substantial settlements.
In the last ten years or so understanding of the period has begun to improve slowly with new discoveries that have modified this view. The most recent discovery in 2012-13 of rare 8,000 year old houses at Lunt Meadows, Sefton, north of Liverpool, is another important development in our understanding of a way of life that began to disappear about 6000 years ago with the introduction of farming into Britain.