Ken Follett

Most of the Stone Age settlements show really quite small houses with something like four post holes.

So we guess that the rest of the house, probably the walls were wattle and daub, which is the simplest way to build a wall.

The wattle is flexible branches from trees, which can be bent a little bit and can be interwoven to make a big patch.

And the daub is the mud that you stick on this and in the holes, which serves, first of all, to keep it all stuck together.

And secondly...

to keep the drafts out so there's nothing left of those so those are the houses they're pretty small they might have had mattresses

probably made of leather stuffed with straw.

I say made of leather because although they probably had weaving, and I've learned recently that there are some Stone Age loom weights, or at least objects that look like loom weights and seem to be dated to the Stone Age, but weaving at that level is very arduous and takes a long time.

So you wouldn't have much of it.

And so leather would have been their preferred fabric because they had plenty of that.

because they had 2,000 cows, you know.

So they probably did have something other than the bare floor to lie down on.

But they didn't have many possessions.

If you look around your house,

I mean, you've got cupboards and bookshelves and fridges and drawers, and you might even have a garden shed with tools in it.

We've got millions of possessions, and they probably didn't have very many in the Stone Age.

A cooking pot, which of course would have been pottery rather than metal, and bowls and cups perhaps, and that would have been about it.

So they didn't need very big houses.

It seems to me very likely that they sat around a fire, particularly in summer when it wasn't too cold to sit on the ground.

They sat around a fire.