As the demand for comfort and status increased, one or more rooms would be heated. Finally the stove was moved into an enclosed kitchen rather than being in a Flett or open hearth at the end of the hall. Predecessors The Low German house is similar in construction to the neolithic longhouse, although there is no evidence of a direct connexion. The longhouse first appeared during the period of the Linear Pottery culture about 7,000 years ago and has been discovered during the course of archaeological excavations in widely differing regions across Europe, including the Ville ridge west of Cologne. The longhouse differed from later types of house in that it had a central row of posts under the roof ridge. It was therefore not three- but four-aisled. To start with, cattle were kept outside overnight in Hürden or pens. With the transition of agriculture to permanent fields the cattle were brought into the house, which then became a so-called Wohnstallhaus or byre-dwelling. Later the centre posts were omitted to form a triple-aisled longhouse (dreischiffigen Langhaus, often a dreischiffigen Wohnstallhaus) that could be found in almost all of northwest Europe in the Early Middle Ages. Its roof structure rested as before on posts set into the ground and was therefore not very durable or weight-bearing. As a result, these houses already had rafters, but no loft to store the harvest. The outer walls were only made of wattle and daub (Flechtwerk). By the Carolingian era, houses built for the nobility had their wooden, load-bearing posts set on foundations of wood or stone. Such uprights, called Ständer, were very strong and lasted several hundred years. These posts were first used for farmhouses in northern Germany from the 13th century, and enable them to be furnished with a load-bearing loft. In the 15th and 16th centuries the design of the timber-framing was further perfected. Distribution The Low German house had a wide distribution across an area almost 1,000 km long which roughly corresponds to the Low German language area. In the west it stretched into parts of the Netherlands where the height of gable and loft are usually lower, mirroring its development over time from self-sufficiency to market-oriented farming. From the Lower Rhine region to western Mecklenburg the Low German house was the dominant type of farmhouse. Further east it was found as far as the Danzig Bay, but manor houses (Gutshaus)