Neolithic use of polished or ground stone tools, in contrast to the flaked stone tools used during the Paleolithic era. Neolithic people were skilled farmers, manufacturing a range of tools necessary for the tending, harvesting and processing of crops (such as sickle blades and grinding stones) and food production (e.g. pottery, bone implements). They were also skilled manufacturers of a range of other types of stone tools and ornaments, including projectile points, beads, and statuettes. But what allowed forest clearance on a large scale was the polished stone axe above all other tools. Together with the adze, fashioning wood for shelter,
Neolithic and Bronze Age rock art in the British Isles might have been induced by the use of hallucinogenic drugs, evidence for which exists from Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe. This idea was first applied to the petroglyphs on the Neolithic monuments of the British Isles by David Lewis-Williams and T. Dowson. They noted that the depiction of phosphenes could appear independently in different areas due their common basis in the human nervous system. Lewis-Williams and David Pearce expanded on this idea in their book "Inside the Neolithic Mind". Bradley extended these ideas to suggest that the circular designs on open air petroglyphs might have represented a pathway that led