This week it was revealed that wheat was found at the Bouldnor Cliff site off the coast of the Isle of Wight in England. The discovery was notable because the wheat was 8,000 years old, and agriculture wouldn’t make its way to the British Isles for another 2,000 years.

The research, published in the journal Science, suggests that it is an indication of trade routs with Europe which hadn’t previously been guessed at.

A search for pollen, which would indicate that the wheat had been grown locally and that scientists had simply gotten the time line wrong came up empty.

The wheat strain called einkorn, literally “single grain” in German, is currently popular with “ancient grain” aficionados and was fairly common in Europe at the time. Einkorn was one of the first strains of wheat to be cultivated and had slowly made its way north from the Middle East.

“Amongst our Bouldner Cliff samples we found ancient DNA evidence of wheat at the site, which was not seen in mainland Britain for another 2,000 years. However, wheat was already being grown in southern Europe. This is incredibly exciting because it means Bouldner’s inhabitants were not as isolated as previously thought. In fact, they were in touch, one way or another, with more advanced Neolithic farming communities in southern Europe,” said Robin Allaby of the University of Warwick to Scientific American.

The discovery is just the most recent sign of a fairly sophisticated, for its time, culture at the site. The description “Neolithic hunter gatherers” may give the impression of people barely more advanced than cave dwellers. However, that does not appear to be the case.

First, to put things in context, 8,000 years ago the ice age was just coming to an end. It would be another 2,000 years before the first civilizations sprang up in Mesopotamia, or before horses and chickens were domesticated. It would be another thousand years after that before the First Dynasty in Egypt and the construction of Stonehenge.

At the time of settlement, it would have been an ideal location for human settlement. The region is believed to have been in a sheltered valley, surrounded by forest with a river and a lake.

Extracting artifacts and information from the Bouldner Cliff site, located 36 feet underwater and 800 feet offshore from Bouldnor, near Yarmouth on the Isle of Wigh, has not been easy. The site was discovered in 1999 when a lobster was seen pushing small stone age tools out of its burrow.

Since that time there have been annual dives to retrieve artifacts, but swift currents and erosion in the area have made the retrieval of any material a challenge.

Despite the difficulties, more than 2,000 tools have been recovered including cutting tools and woodworking tools. Woodworking by the inhabitants of the area appears to have been fairly sophisticated, with some of the wood found cut into the shape of a conduit or “pipe” and what appears to be a boat building facility.

“There appears to be evidence of a boat building yard and tools more advanced than anything we’ve found on land – on a level of 2,000 years ahead all preserved perfectly in the silt underwater,” Garry Momber, director of the Maritime Archaeology Trust told the BBC in November, 2014.

The remains of dwellings found at the site indicate not only fire pits but hollowed out clay structures which appear to have been filled with hot stones, either for industry or heating.

In short, coming out of the ice age there now appears to have been small scale industry and even trade with Europe being conducted at the site.

At the rate currents and erosion are deteriorating the site it is doubtful that the full story of the Bouldnor Cliff people will ever be known. However, they appear to have been a much more advanced and sophisticated culture than the ‘Neolithic hunter-gatherer’ label brings to mind.

Regularly updated information on new finds at the site, as well as archival information on previous drives can be found at the Maritime Archeology Trust web site.