Hello and welcome to the History Extra podcast from BBC History Magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Cawthorne. How did prehistoric people in Britain view and understand the world around them?

What did they smell, hear and see?

Francis Pryor is one of Britain's leading archaeologists and a familiar face from

TV series such as Time Team. Following the publication of Francis's new book, Seens from Prehistoric Life,

our content director Dave Musgrove caught up with him to talk all about the prehistoric mindset.

So Francis, welcome, welcome to the

podcast. Your new book, Scenes from Prehistoric Life, from the Ice Age to the coming of the Romans.

It's just been published. It's a great book. So congratulations on that. And thank you very much for

joining us on the podcast. First up, how are you? I'm very well, actually, Dave. Yes, feeling remarkably relaxed. Good, good stuff.

So, as I said, it's a really interesting book covering a very big topic, a lot of time,

loads of detail and colour and loads of stories covered. And obviously, we can't hope to

cover all the riches that you talk about.

But what I was hoping to do in the course of this conversation is to focus in a bit on

a few topics that I think are interesting, trying to understand maybe a little bit about

how prehistoric people might have viewed the world that they existed. And when I say prehistoric,

obviously, that's a very big term to use, and I'm

going to sort of invite you to pick moments from the topic when I ask you the questions. But

firstly, I think before we jump into it, what we need to do is just define prehistory for our

listeners. Would you be able to give us a very top-level summation of what we mean by

prehistory and the various periods within it? Right. Well, in a nutshell, pre-history means pre-before

history. And history is written history. So basically, you're talking about people who lived before the introduction of writing.

And in Britain, that happened with the arrival of the Romans in AD 43.

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