[00:02.428]The grandest of these tombs had openings cut in the wall.
[00:05.675]To create side chambers where the most important bodies .
[00:09.291]Could be laid out in aristocratic spaciousness like family vaults in a country church.
[00:19.998]Unlike medieval knights, though, these grandees were buried with eagles and dogs, or even treasure.
[00:27.838]The kind of thing that the Vikings who broke into these tombs thousands of years later were quick to filch.
[00:37.824]In return, though, these early tomb raiders left their own legacy.
[00:42.089]These wonderful graffiti，these runes were carved by the most skilled rune carver in the western ocean.
[00:51.021]I bedded thorny here. Ingegirth is one horny bitch.
[01:04.450]As for the Orcadian hoi polloi, well, they ranked space in a common chamber.
[01:09.911]On a floor carpeted with the bones of hundreds of their predecessors.
[01:15.373]A crowded waiting room to their afterworld.
[01:30.373]For centuries, life at Skara Brae must have continued in much the same way.
[01:35.490]But around 2,500 BC, the island climate seems to have got colder and wetter.
[01:42.493]The red bream disappeared, and so did the stable environment the Orcadians had enjoyed for countless generations.
[01:50.468]Fields were abandoned, the farmers and fishers migrated, leaving their stone buildings and tombs.
[01:57.297]To be covered by layers of peat, drifting sand and finally grass.