Ken Follett

And so from the point of view of a storyteller like me, if there's conflict, there's a story to tell.

Yes, there has to be cooperation to achieve certain things and certainly building a monument.

is something that hundreds of people would have needed to cooperate on.

Farmers are a bit more individualistic.

This is my field.

This is my cow shed.

Whereas herders can't be quite so egotistical, I suppose, because Salisbury Plain could have sustained a herd of about 2,000 cattle.

and i thought about this and i thought well how are we going to keep track of who owns which cow even to people who you know who work with animals one cow can look a bit like another

and how to prove that it was yours.

Now, later in human history, ways were devised of putting your mark on livestock to show that it was yours.

And nowadays, for example, you quite often see a symbol painted in red paint on a sheep's fleece.

That's to indicate who that sheep belongs to.

And with cattle, of course, they can be branded, which is to put a mark on the hide with a hot iron.

And they didn't have any iron.

This is the Stone Age.

So they can't brand the cattle.

And they didn't really have any paint.

They used a little bit of ochre as a dye.

But you would have needed gallons of paint to identify thousands of livestock.

So it seemed to me that they must have been communally owned.