The steel of the Stone Age was flint. With short, precise strikes on a flint nodule, a blade would split off. From this, the pile-dwelling people fashioned chisels, scrapers, drills, arrowheads – in short, small tools for every purpose.

But other types of rock were also valuable: granite was the raw material for grain mills. Sandstone was used to make grinding plates, whilst particularly hard green and black rocks were fashioned into powerful axes and hatchets. Limestone – polished, ground and drilled – could be fashioned into pretty decorative beads. And ground hematite provided the perfect body paint. To use it, the red powder simply had to be mixed with a little fat.