A lost world lies buried beneath the bucolicThe pleasant aspects of the countryside and country life. English countryside. Yesterday, archaeologists announced an astonishing discovery less than two miles from Stonehenge.

The circle of up to 30 deep shafts is the "largest prehistoric structure" in Britain. Each pit is 10-metres wide and five-metres deep, an incredible achievement for Neolithic people with only stone, wood, and bone tools at their disposal.

Archaeologist Vincent Gaffney says the find "shows an even more complex society than we could ever imagine" flourishing 4,500 years ago. The precision and planning required to build the site shows people with a counting system and a sophisticated religious and social life, long before the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids.

Though we know relatively little about the people who dug these shafts and built Stonehenge - because, unlike the ancient Egyptians, they wrote nothing down - some experts believe Stone Age people were much happier than we are today.

We are normally taught that history has been a long march of progress from savagery to civilisation. Life expectancy in the Neolithic period was below 35 and, without modern medicine and technology, disease and famine were an inevitable part of life. If sickness and starvation didn't kill you, a wild animal or a hostile tribe might. Life was short, scary, and dangerous.

Today, we can expect to live well into your seventies and beyond. We are inoculated against most infectious diseases and we are unlikely ever to experience starvation. War and violenceThis is a highly contested subject. Steven Pinker's landmark 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, argued the world has never been so peaceful. Other experts have disputed his findings. are in decline, and we have hunted most dangerous animals to extinction.

But historian Yuval Noah Harari believes we are less happy.

He argues that we have inherited a cave-dwelling brain that is better suited to hunting mammoths than it is to scrolling through InstagramA social-networking service that allows users to share photographs and videos.. Happiness is a biochemical reward for achieving goals. Hunter-gathers's main goal was to stay alive: so as long as they were finding food, they were feeling great.

It is much more difficult to stay happy in the modern world, where most of our basic needs are taken care of and we often live with very little human interaction. By contrast, our ancestors relied on close-knit relationships to survive cold winters, long journeys, and dangerous hunting expeditions.

Our more advanced goals - love, wealth, and success - should make us happy. But social scientists warn happiness is based on expectations. News and social media allow us to compare our lives to all the world's celebrities. Compared to them, we will always feel dissatisfied.

Our Neolithic ancestors compared themselves to 150 other people, who were very much alike, and they would have been fairly happy with the comparison.

Yes. We lived in small communities and formed strong intimate friendships in order to stay alive. In the modern age, we often feel overwhelmed by choice, uncertainty, and expectations. Neolithic life may have been dangerous and precariousUnpredictable; uncertain., but this forced our ancestors to live for the moment, with richer and happier lives.

No. Life was nasty, brutish, and short. Modern society frees us from the fear of war and famine. And incredible advances in technology and entertainment mean our lives are crammed full of exciting, interesting, and inspiring possibilities. By comparison, Stone Age lives were monotonous, predictable, and boring.