What follows is our interpretation of what we read and learned. It is what two travelers made of a shelf of books and papers, museum displays and documentaries, set down so we can carry the story with us as we cross the places where it happened and to review it when needed. Those primers really help us to get a better understanding of what we see as we travel. It is a handy “cheat sheet” that we update and use frequently.

This post covers prehistory and protohistory, and stops at the threshold of history. The three are defined by writing:

• Prehistory is the time before anyone in a region wrote and the region was not described by outsiders. Everything known about it comes from the ground: bones, tools, pots, graves, and now ancient DNA.
• Protohistory is the time when a people and the region they occupied is described by literate neighbors: the Celts as Caesar saw them, the Germani as Tacitus described them.
• History begins when a people writes its own record. The line between them has nothing to do with how advanced anyone was. It is about when writing, which was invented in the Near East, reached them. A people near the Mediterranean crossed into history early. A people on the Baltic or the eastern plain waited centuries longer, not because it was behind, but because the literate world , the writing technology had not yet arrived at its door.

A lot of what follows rests on ancient and modern DNA, a field only about fifteen years old and advancing fast. Some of what looked settled ten years ago has since been overturned, and some of what follows will probably be overturned too.

A people, a culture, and a language are three separate things. It is always important to remember the definitions:

• A people is a group joined by shared ancestors.
• A culture, in archaeology, is a technological toolkit and customs: a set of artefacts found in the ground across a region and a time span, a way of making blades, of shaping pots, of burying the dead. Usually the cultures are named after the site where these artefacts were first recognized. A culture is not a people. Two different peoples can share a culture, and one people can change its culture without changing its ancestry.
• A language is the words in the mouth, and it too travels independently. A group can take up a new language without new ancestors, or a new way of making tools without a new tongue.

Traditionally historians classify the prehistory into ages. The ages name the long periods of prehistory by what cultures made their tools from.

• The Paleolithic, the old Old Stone Age, is the vast stretch of chipped-stone tools and hunting, running from the first stone tools over 1,000,000 years ago in Europe down to the end of the last ice age around 12,000 years ago. It alone is divided into three phases:
  • Lower Paleolithic, the earliest and longest, when older human species made simple hand-axes;
  • Middle Palaeolithic, from around 300,000 years ago, the age of finer flake tools struck from prepared cores; and the
  • Upper Palaeolithic, from around 45,000 years ago, the age of narrow blades, bone tools, and the first art.
• The Mesolithic, the Middle Stone Age, is the short bridge between the ice and farming, when hunter-gatherer cultures developed smaller, finer stone tools for a warmed and wooded world, roughly 12,000 to 6,000 years ago.
• The Neolithic, the New Stone Age, begins when farming arrives, and with it polished stone, pottery, and the settled village from around 6,500 BC.
• The Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, is the transitional period when cultures began working copper alongside stone.
• The Bronze Age follows, when copper was alloyed with tin to make bronze, and with it came the horse, the wheel, and the wagon.
• The Iron Age comes last, when iron replaced bronze for tools and weapons.

These ages did not start at the same time everywhere, because the innovations that define them reached different parts of Europe at different times, carried by different peoples and modifying the culture of people they came in contact with. Almost none of them were invented in Europe. Farming, pottery, copper, bronze, and iron all came from the Near East. This is the cradle of those things, the lands at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, roughly modern Syria, Iraq, and the Fertile Crescent, where farming and metalworking began. The corner of it that matters most for Europe is Anatolia, the peninsula of modern Turkey that forms the western edge of the Near East and bridges directly into Europe. The farmers who carried the whole package into Europe came from there. The horse, the wheel, and the wagon came from somewhere else entirely, the steppe, the belt of open grassland north of the Black Sea, in what is now southern Ukraine and southern Russia, the western end of the vast grassland that runs east across Eurasia.

The named cultures, the Aurignacian, the Gravettian, the Corded Ware and the rest you will find in this post, sit inside these ages as the specific toolkits and ways of life of particular times and regions. The ages name the materials tools were made of. The cultures name the style. Both are labels for what was found in the ground, and neither is a people. There are dozens, possibly hundreds of named archaeological cultures across European prehistory, known only in one region or lasting only a few centuries. This account follows only the ones widespread enough and long-lasting enough to appear in the large-scale DNA story.

This way of naming is the same method used to read the peopling of the Americas. There, the earliest peoples are known by the shape of their stone spear points, pre-Clovis, Clovis Folsom and others, each a toolkit that stands in for a culture. Europe is read the same way. Aurignacian, Gravettian, Magdalenian: these are toolkits characteristic of a culture. On both continents the deep past is sorted by what was chipped from stone, because for most of the human story that is nearly all that survives.

The first post of this series (read it here) followed our own kind, Homo sapiens, out of Africa and across the world. One branch of that spread turned northwest, through the Near East, and reached Europe around 45,000 years ago. Those people are where this story begins. They are the same human beings the first post was following, arrived at the western edge of the world.

I. Lower Paleolithic

I.1 Homo erecturs and heildelbergensis – Oldowan and Acheulean Cultures

Europe was already occupied, and had been for a very long time. The earlier human species, Homo erectus and then Homo heidelbergensis, had reached Europe more than 1,000,000 years ago and made the simple hand-axes of the Lower Paleolithic.

Those earliest Europeans are known, as everyone in this account is, by the stone they left. The oldest tools are the simplest: the Oldowan, little more than a pebble struck a few times to make a sharp edge, the first technology of the genus Homo, carried into Europe by Homo erectus. In time came something better, the Acheulean, the great teardrop-shaped hand-axe, worked on both faces to a deliberate symmetrical form. The hand-axe is the signature tool of Homo heidelbergensis, more or less unchanged, for over a million years, the longest-lived design in human history. Both were still the Lower Paleolithic, the age of the hand-axe, long before the finer flake tools of the Neanderthals.

II. Midele Paleolithic

II.1 The neanderthals – Mousterian and Châtelperronian cultures

Out of the heildelbergensis, in Europe, evolved the Neanderthals, who held the continent through the whole Middle Paleolithic until our own kind arrived.

The Neanderthals had their own toolkits. Their long-lasting stone industry is called the Mousterian, a set of scrapers, points, and hand-axes made by a skilled method known as the Levallois technique: shaping a flint core with care beforehand, so that a single planned blow struck off a flake of exactly the size and shape wanted. Near the end, as modern humans were arriving, some Neanderthals in France and Spain were making finer blade tools too, an industry called the Châtelperronian, and skeletons found with it prove Neanderthal hands made it. Whether they worked it out themselves or copied it from the newcomers is still argued.

A few places where the evidence for those early human records were found in europe:

• Atapuerca, Spain, a cave complex with remains of the earliest western Europeans and a famous “Pit of Bones” full of Homo heidelbergensis; a UNESCO site you can visit.
• Boxgrove and Swanscombe, England, Lower Palaeolithic sites of Homo heidelbergensis and their hand-axes.
• Mauer, Germany, where the first Homo heidelbergensis jaw was found and the species was named.
• Le Moustier, France, the rock shelter that gave the Neanderthal Mousterian culture its name.
• Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar, one of the last places the Neanderthals survived; a UNESCO site.
• Creswell Crags, England, which holds both Neanderthal tools and, tens of thousands of years later, the cave art of Homo sapiens, two kinds of human in one gorge.

For a few thousand years after Homo sapiens arrived, the two kinds of human shared the continent. They met and mixed a little, which is why everyone whose roots lie outside Africa still carries a trace of Neanderthal DNA. By around 40,000 years ago the Neanderthals were gone, absorbed and outlasted, and Europe was left to our own kind.

Summary of Europe Cultures prior to Homo sapiens arrival

Human Species	Rough Dates in Europe (years ago)	Paleolithic Phase	Culture
Erectus and Antecessor	14,000,000 – 800,000	Lower Paleolithic	Oldowan pebble tools, then early hand-axes
Heidelbergensis	600,000 – 300,000	Lower Paleolithic	Acheulean (finely made hand-axes)
Neanderhal	400,000 – 40,000	Middle Paleolithic	Mousterian, made with the Levallois technique; Châtelperronian at the end

The first Europeans were already a blend, modern humans with a little of an older human inside them like everywhere else across the globe. From here, Europe is blending several sapiens groups, layer over layer.

Four layers made it:

• The hunter-gatherers were already here, the painters of the caves, the ones who outlasted the ice.
• The farmers came out of Anatolia bringing agriculture.
• The herders came off the eastern steppe with the horse and the language most of Europe still speaks.
• And along the far north ran a fourth and thinner strand out of Siberia.

Almost every European alive is a mixture of the first three, and the northerners of all four. What follows is how those layers were laid down, and how the peoples in Europe evolved out of the mixture.

III. The Upper Paleolithic

For most of the human story in Europe there was only one kind of people, the hunter-gatherers. Their story runs for over thirty thousand years, from the first wave arrival to the end of the ice, all of it in the Upper Paleolithic, when every tool was made by striking or pressing stone.

III.1. The Aurignacians

Those first Homo sapiens spread across the continent after 45,000 years ago. They are the people once called the Cro-Magnons, after the rock shelter in France where their bones were first found, though scientists now usually just call them the earliest modern Europeans. Their earliest toolkit is the Aurignacian, after the cave of Aurignac in southern France. The Aurignacian toolkit is defined by the blade: long, narrow flakes struck from prepared stone cores, more efficient and more regular than the cruder flake tools of the humans who came before. From these blades came the burin, a chisel-edged engraving tool for carving bone, antler, and ivory. From antler came split-base bone points, spear tips with a forked base made to be hafted onto a wooden shaft. Stone, bone, and wood fitted together into composite weapons.

They also carved. From mammoth ivory they made small figures of animals, and, in a cave in Germany, the Lion Man, a standing figure with a human body and a lion’s head, some forty thousand years old, a creature that exists nowhere in nature. The same people made the first musical instruments, flutes of bird bone and ivory. From the very beginning, these modern humans were not only toolmakers but artists.

In the caves at Chauvet, in southern France, the Aurignacians painted horses and lions and rhinoceros on the rock, in charcoal and ochre, more than thirty thousand years ago. The drawing is sure and exact. These hunter-gatherers were artists.

The animals on the cave walls were also the food on the fire. These were ice-age hunters, and they lived on the great cold-climate beasts of the age: the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the wild horse, the bison, the reindeer, and the red deer. They took smaller game and birds, fished the rivers, and gathered what plants, roots, and nuts the cold land gave. Everything came from the wild. Nothing was farmed, nothing was herded, and no plant or animal had yet been tamed. A band followed the herds across the seasons, and its whole life was tied to where the big animals went.

III.2 The Gravettians

By around 33,000 years ago a different toolkit had spread across much of the continent, named the Gravettian after the site of La Gravette in the Dordogne. The Gravettians were not a new people arriving. They were the descendants of the Aurignacians, their tools evolved, still hunter-gatherers in the same land. Their toolkit is built around the Gravette point, a narrow blade with one edge steeply blunted by retouching, shaped to be set into a handle or shaft as a piercing or cutting edge. They made backed bladelets, small blades with one dulled side, fitted in rows along a bone or wooden shaft to form a composite knife or spear. Their art was not on cave walls but in their hands: small carved figures of women in stone, ivory, and bone, with exaggerated breasts, hips, and bellies. The most widely known is the Venus of Willendorf, found in Austria, carved from limestone, small enough to hold in one hand, around 25,000 years old. What these figures meant is unknown. They are found across thousands of miles, from France to Russia. The Gravettian world was connected over distances no single band walked in a lifetime.

III.3 The Magdalenians, and the Epigravettians

From around 26,000 years ago the last ice age reached its worst. Ice and frozen tundra spread over the north until people could not live there, and they fell back into the warm corners of the south, into Iberia, Italy, and the Balkans. The rest of Europe emptied. For thousands of years the human presence on the continent was pressed into these southern refuges.

This deep freeze, the coldest point of the last ice age, is called the Last Glacial Maximum, and it fell roughly between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago. It shaped the whole world at once, and here the parallel with the Americas is exact, because it is the very same event. So much of the planet’s water was locked into ice that sea levels dropped by more than a hundred meters. In Europe this drove people south into the warm refuges. On the far side of the globe the same fallen seas laid bare a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, and it was across that bridge, during and just after this same glacial maximum, that the first people walked into the Americas. One ice age, one drop in the seas, and two continents changed: Europe emptied toward its southern edges, and the Americas were entered for the first time. The great cold beasts felt it too. The woolly rhinoceros, the giant deer, and the mammoth were pushed into ever smaller ranges as the ice bit, and most were gone, in Europe, not long after the thaw, whether from the changing climate, from human hunting, or from both together.

The refuges were far apart, and the people in them, all descendants of the same Gravettian population, drifted from one another over those long millennia.

In the west, in Iberia and France, a new toolkit formed: the Magdalenian, named after the rock shelter of La Madeleine in the Dordogne. What defines it is the microlith, a tiny blade shaped into geometric forms (triangles, crescents, trapezoids), made to be set in rows along a shaft as cutting edges or projectile points. From bone and antler the Magdalenians made barbed harpoons for fishing, sewing needles with eyed holes for stitching animal-skin clothing, and spear-throwers (atlatls) that extended the reach and force of the arm. They painted the later caves: Lascaux around seventeen thousand years ago, Altamira around fifteen thousand, along with Font-de-Gaume, Rouffignac, and dozens more across southwestern France and northern Spain. Chauvet belongs to the Aurignacians, tens of thousands of years earlier. Lascaux and Altamira belong to the Magdalenians.

In the Balkans and the southeast, a different path: the Epigravettians. The Gravettian toolkit continued, carried forward by a population that had by now developed closer genetic ties to the Near East than the western group had.

III.4 The Villabruna turnover

When the ice drew back, from around 19,000 years ago, both groups spread into the land it uncovered. The Magdalenians moved back into western and central Europe. The Epigravettians moved into Italy, which had not been a continuous refuge as long assumed but was genetically overturned by this Balkan population. From around 14,000 years ago the Epigravettians expanded further, out of Italy and across the continent, largely replacing the Magdalenians. The genomes before and after this point do not match: hunter-gatherers from after 14,000 years ago carry a southeastern ancestry with Near Eastern connections that the Magdalenians did not have. This population turnover is called the Villabruna shift, after the Italian rock shelter where the newcomers first appear in the record. The Villabruna individual was Epigravettian.

The ice split one population into separate pockets, those pockets diverged, and when the thaw came, one pocket’s descendants overran the other’s. Before any farmer or herder, before anything you could call a nation, Europe was already being peopled and re-peopled, one group giving way to the next.

Where to see them: sites and museums

Nearly all of this can be met on the ground, and the best single region for it is the Vézère valley around Les Eyzies, in the Dordogne of southwest France, where more than two hundred Palaeolithic sites cluster, many of them UNESCO-listed. Northern Spain (Cantabria) is the other great centre. One thing to know before setting out: the original painted caves are almost all sealed now, or open to only a handful of visitors a day, to preserve them. The great ones are visited as exact replicas, which are superb rather than second-best, and everything below needs booking well ahead.

The Aurignacians (the first modern humans)

• Chauvet 2, Ardèche, France, a full-scale replica (opened 2015) of the oldest great cave art in the world, with an excellent interpretation centre. The original will never open; this is how you see it. Open to the public.
• The Lion Man, the 40,000-year-old ivory figure, on display in the Museum Ulm, Germany.

The Gravettians (mammoth hunters, Venus carvers)

• The Venus of Willendorf, in the Natural History Museum, Vienna, on permanent display. The must-see Gravettian object.
• Dolní Věstonice, the eastern Gravettian site, with its finds in the Moravian Museum, Brno, Czech Republic.

The Magdalenians (the great cave painters)

• Lascaux IV, Montignac, Dordogne, a complete replica of the “Sistine Chapel of prehistory,” open all year, timed tickets, book ahead. The original closed in 1963.
• Font-de-Gaume, near Les Eyzies, one of the very last original polychrome caves still open to the public, but on strict limited tickets (about 35 minutes inside, small groups, mid-May to mid-September and reduced hours after); reserve well in advance.
• Rouffignac, Dordogne, the “cave of a hundred mammoths,” the largest decorated cave open in the valley, toured by electric train (seasonal, roughly April to November).
• Altamira, Santillana del Mar, Cantabria, Spain, the polychrome bison, seen in the museum’s full replica cave (“Neocueva”); the original is closed. Museum open year-round.
• The National Museum of Prehistory, Les Eyzies, the largest Palaeolithic collection in France and the anchor that sets the whole region in context. Open year-round (check seasonal hours).

The Epigravettians and the Villabruna turnover (the southeastern culture, and the genetic shift)

• Best met in Italian museums rather than at a single dramatic site: the Pigorini Museum, Rome. Epigravettian cave engravings survive in Sicily at the Grotta del Genovese on Levanzo island.
• The Villabruna turnover is a genetic finding, not a place to visit; it is best understood in a museum’s ancient-DNA and migration display.

If you see only one place: the Vézère valley around Les Eyzies. In two days it gives you Lascaux IV, an original cave such as Font-de-Gaume or Rouffignac, and the National Museum of Prehistory, which ties the whole sequence together. Add Chauvet 2 (Ardèche) and Altamira (Cantabria) if ranging wider, and the Venus of Willendorf in Vienna for the Gravettians’ greatest object.

IV. The Mesolithic

The ice ended around 11,700 years ago. Tundra gave way to forest, open grassland to woodland, and the big herds the Palaeolithic hunters had followed either moved north or died out. The people who remained adapted. Their stone tools grew smaller and finer, tiny worked flints called microliths, set in rows into arrows and light spears, fitted to a wooded world of different game: deer, boar, fish, birds. The same thing happened at the same time on the other side of the world. In the Americas, the end of the same ice age killed off the mammoth and the giant bison, and the hunters’ great Clovis and Folsom points gave way to smaller, more varied tools for smaller prey. On both continents the story is the same: when the big animals went, the weapons shrank to match what was left. This is the Mesolithic, the Middle Stone Age, the last age of the hunter-gatherers before farming arrived.

Europe is a peninsula, walled by sea on three sides, the Atlantic to the west, the Mediterranean to the south, the Arctic to the north, and open to the rest of the world on only one side, the east, where it joins the vast Eurasian landmass through the grasslands north of the Black and Caspian Seas. Almost everyone and everything that entered Europe came through that eastern door, or the southeastern one beside it. From the west there was only the ocean.

This shaped the people at each end differently. Those in the east lived at the open door, on the steppe road that ran off into Siberia and Central Asia, in direct contact with whoever came down it, meeting and mixing with peoples from further east, and that contact left its mark in their blood. Those in the far west lived at the closed end, against the Atlantic. New things still reached them, but slowly and second-hand, having to travel the whole length of the continent first, so they arrived late and weakened, a spreading ripple rather than a meeting. The west was not sealed off; it was simply the last and faintest place anything from the east could reach. That is why its people changed least, and changed slowest.

IV.1 The Western Hunter-Gatherers

The descendants of the Epigravettians who had replaced the Magdalenians are the population ancient DNA calls the Western Hunter-Gatherers. By the time the ice age ended they were spread across a warming, wooded continent, and their genes carry dark skin and pale, often blue, eyes.

The color of a person seven thousand years dead can be known because skin and eye color are set by particular genes, and those genes survive in ancient bone. A man who lived about seven thousand years ago in what is now northern Spain, at a site called La Braña, has had his whole genome read. At the genes that lighten European skin he carried the older, African forms, so his skin was dark. At the gene that turns eyes blue he carried the blue variant. The dark skin follows from where these people came from, since Africa is where every human began dark-skinned. The blue eyes have no obvious explanation at that date. The people who outlasted the ice looked nothing like the Europeans who later lived on the same ground. For a few thousand more years they were the whole of Europe. Then, from the southeast, strangers came.

IV.2 The Eastern Hunter-Gatherers

They were not the only hunter-gatherers in post-ice-age Europe. Further east, from the Baltic to the Urals and south to the grasslands above the Black Sea, lived a different population: the Eastern Hunter-Gatherers. They were related to the western group but carried an ancestry traced to Siberia, called Ancient North Eurasian, which the western group lacked. The border between the two ran roughly from the lower Danube, north along the Dnieper, to the western Baltic. In Scandinavia the two met and mixed, producing the Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers, roughly two-thirds western and one-third eastern.

The eastern hunter-gatherers are one of the two peoples who made the Yamnaya. When the steppe herders move west into Europe as the third layer, half of what they carry is ancestry from this eastern group, which had been on Europe’s eastern edge since the ice age. The other half came from the Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers further south.

Where to see them: sites and museums

These peoples are harder to visit than the cave painters before them. They were mobile foragers who left campsites, tools, and burials rather than painted caves, so for most of them the experience is a museum case, and the four are genetic populations whose best sites are scattered.

• The Western Hunter-Gatherers (the dark-skinned, blue-eyed foragers of the west) are the most visitable:
  • Cheddar Man, the complete skeleton, is displayed at the Museum of Somerset in Taunton, near Cheddar Gorge where he was found.
  • The finds from Star Carr, Britain’s most famous Mesolithic camp, are at the Yorkshire Museum in York.
• The Scandinavian Hunter-Gatherers (the northern mixture) are best met in the museums of Denmark and Sweden, whose waterlogged sites preserved the boats, bows, and fish traps that rotted away elsewhere.
  • The National Museum of Denmark (Copenhagen)
  • The Historical Museum (Stockholm) are the places to see them.
• The Eastern Hunter-Gatherers (the eastern foragers with the Siberian strand) have no visitor sites within easy reach; their homeland lay on the Russian plain, and their finds are held in Russian museums. They are best understood in a museum’s ancient-DNA display rather than visited.
• The Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers (the southern strand that helped make the Yamnaya) are the hardest of all: a genetic finding from caves in Georgia, not a visitor destination.
  • Their prehistory is held in the Georgian National Museum (Tbilisi).

If you want the Mesolithic world in one place, the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, with the Moesgaard Museum near Aarhus (read our blog), is the finest destination anywhere for it. Denmark’s bogs preserved the actual wood, bone, and antler of the hunter-gatherers, so its museums show how these people truly lived, not just the flint they left behind.

V. The Neolithic

Everything up to this point had been stone, chipped or flaked, in the hands of people who followed the game and gathered what grew wild. Then farming arrived, and with it polished stone axes, the first pottery, and the settled village. This is the Neolithic, and none of it was invented in Europe. Every part of the package came from the Near East, carried by people who walked in from Anatolia.

V.1 Farmers from Anatolia

The strangers were farmers, out of Anatolia, the broad land between the Near East and Europe. In their homeland, some thousands of years before, people had planted wheat and barley and kept sheep and goats in pens, and stayed in one place to tend them. Why farming began at all is an unsettled question, tangled with the end of the ice age and the particular wild grains of the Near Eastern hills. What reached Europe was their descendants, carrying seed and livestock, moving west.

The package they carried was specific. The crops were einkorn wheat and emmer wheat, barley, lentils, peas, chickpeas, bitter vetch, and flax. None of these had wild ancestors in Europe. Every one was domesticated in the Near East, most of them in the hills of southeastern Turkey and the Fertile Crescent, and carried west with the farmers who grew them. The animals were sheep and goats, also entirely Near Eastern, with no wild ancestors anywhere in Europe, and cattle and pigs, which have a more tangled story. The farmers brought domesticated Near Eastern cattle, but Europe had its own wild cattle, the aurochs, a massive animal that had lived here since the ice age. The two interbred, and modern European cattle carry both lineages. The farmers also brought Near Eastern pigs, but within a few thousand years the imported pig DNA had almost entirely disappeared, replaced by interbreeding with the wild boar native to European forests. The idea of keeping pigs came from the east. The pigs themselves became local.

Moving a whole farming way of life across a continent was not a simple thing, and the difficulty shows in how it spread. Seed grain is easy: a handful of wheat or barley weighs little and travels anywhere, by land or in a small boat. Sheep and goats are not much harder, small, docile animals that can be driven overland or carried a few at a time across water, which is why they reached islands and far coasts early. Cattle and, later, horses were another matter. They are large, heavy, and hard to move, above all across the sea, so their spread tended to follow the land routes and lagged behind the lighter parts of the package. This is part of why farming crossed Europe by two roads rather than one, a Mediterranean coastal route and an inland route up the Danube, and why the full package, crops and all four animals together, did not arrive everywhere at once. What could be carried went first and furthest; what had to be walked came slower and by land.

Two crops were European. Oats and rye both started as weeds growing uninvited among the imported wheat and barley. As farming spread northwest into the wetter, cooler parts of Europe where the Near Eastern grains did less well, these weeds thrived, and people began cultivating them deliberately. By the time farming reached the north and west, oats and rye had gone from pests to food.

The hunter-gatherers who were already here had no crops and no livestock. They hunted deer, boar, aurochs, and smaller game, fished, and gathered wild plants, nuts, and shellfish. The Paleolithic and Mesolithic economies left no domestic plant or animal behind. Everything the European farmer eventually grew or raised was either imported from the Near East or domesticated from local wild species after the idea of farming arrived. The knowledge came from the east. Some of the raw material was already here.

They entered Europe through the Balkans around 6500 BC and spread by two routes, one along the Mediterranean coast and one inland through central Europe. They reached the central European plain by around 5400 BC, the western Mediterranean and Iberia by around 5500 BC, Britain and the northwestern edge around 4000 BC, and the Baltic later still. The full crossing took roughly two and a half thousand years.

With them came the settled village, the pot, the polished stone axe, the cleared field. They reached nearly everywhere the land could be farmed. The far north, too cold for their crops, they left alone.

A way of life leaves no mark in the genome but ancestry does. Had the hunter-gatherers merely copied farming, the farmers of Europe would carry hunter-gatherer ancestry, the same genomes as before, now with wheat. Instead they carry an ancestry that traces to Anatolia, unlike anything in Europe before them. The farmers moved. Mostly: at the northern and western edges some local hunter-gatherers took up farming and mixed in, which is why a tenth or so of modern European ancestry still traces to them. But in the main the farmers came in person, and in numbers.

They came for the reason farming spreads anywhere. Farming feeds far more people from the same ground than hunting and gathering can, so a farming people grows, its villages fill, and each generation some of the overflow moves further out to clear new fields. Not an army, not a plan, only the pressure of more mouths needing more land, pushing the frontier outward at about a kilometer a year. That is the pace the bones and dates show. Across most of the continent the ancestry of the population shifted, over those millennia, from hunter-gatherer to Anatolian farmer.

Where to see them: sites and museums

The farmers are the easiest of all to visit, because unlike the mobile hunter-gatherers they built in stone and earth, and much of it still stands. They raised the first villages, tombs, and stone circles in Europe, and the great monuments of the Neolithic are among the most impressive prehistoric sites anywhere. The heartland to see them is the Atlantic northwest (Britain, Ireland, and Orkney) and, for their origin, Anatolia.

• Their origin, in Anatolia: Çatalhöyük, in Konya province, Turkey, a UNESCO site and one of the world’s first towns (from around 7100 BC), where the ancestors of Europe’s farmers lived in tightly packed mud-brick houses entered through the roof. This is where the farming way of life came from, before it walked into Europe.
  • Orkney, the “Heart of Neolithic Orkney” (UNESCO), the finest cluster in Europe:
    • Skara Brae, the best-preserved Neolithic village in northern Europe (about 3180 BC), with its stone houses, beds, and dressers still in place, uncovered by a storm.
    • The Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness, great stone circles.
    • Maeshowe, a chambered tomb aligned to the midwinter sun, later carved with Viking runes.
    • All within a few miles of each other on Orkney Mainland, the single richest Neolithic landscape you can walk.
• Stonehenge and Avebury (Wiltshire, England, UNESCO):
  • Stonehenge, the most famous stone circle in the world, built by the farmers around 2500 BC; and
  • Avebury, the largest stone circle in the world, which you can walk among, with Silbury Hill and West Kennet Long Barrow nearby.
• Brú na Bóinne (Boyne Valley, Ireland, UNESCO):
  • Newgrange and its neighbouring passage tombs, older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids, where the rising sun floods the chamber at the winter solstice. The great achievement of the Irish farmers.
• The museums:
  • National Museum of Scotland (Edinburgh) and the
  • National Museum of Ireland (Dublin) hold the finds and set the monuments in context; the
  • British Museum holds Neolithic material too.

If you want the whole Neolithic in one place, go to Orkney. Nowhere else can you stand in a farmer’s actual house, walk inside a five-thousand-year-old tomb built to catch the solstice sun, and stand in two great stone circles, all in a single day and within a few miles. The Heart of Neolithic Orkney is the most complete window on the first farmers’ world anywhere in Europe, and it shows them not as bones or tools in a case but in the homes and monuments they raised and left standing.

VI. The Chalcolithic and Bronze Age

A thousand years or so after the farmers had settled the land, copper began to appear alongside the polished stone tools, worked by hammering and then by smelting. This is the Chalcolithic, the Copper Age. Copper working, like farming, came from the Near East. When copper was alloyed with tin to make bronze, a harder metal, the Bronze Age began, and with it came the third layer: the people of the steppe.

VI.1 The Yamnaya

East of Europe, north of the Black Sea, the land opens into grassland running unbroken for thousands of miles toward Central Asia: the steppe. On its western end, the Pontic-Caspian steppe, lived herders who had tamed the horse and built the wheeled wagon. Both were steppe innovations, not European. A people on horseback, with wagons to carry their homes, could live off the open grass, move with their herds, and cross ground that had held nobody. They are called the Yamnaya, from a Russian word for pit-grave, since burying their dead in ochre-lined pits under low mounds is nearly the only thing they left.

The Yamnaya were themselves a mixture of two older populations: the Eastern Hunter-Gatherers of the steppe, who had been on Europe’s eastern edge since the ice age, and the Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers further south, in roughly equal measure.

The Yamnaya spoke an early form of Indo-European, the parent of most of the languages of Europe, Iran, and northern India. Speech leaves no fossil. Three lines of evidence point the same way.

The first is the languages themselves. Linguists, long before any DNA, saw that most of the languages from Ireland to India share so many deep roots that they must descend from one lost parent. They reconstructed pieces of that parent, Proto-Indo-European, from the words its daughters hold in common. The shared vocabulary includes words for the horse, the wheel, the wagon, the axle, wool, and dairying. So its speakers lived after the taming of the horse and the invention of the wheel, and they kept herds. That fits a herding people of the fourth millennium BC, and the steppe is where both the horse and the wheel first appear.

The second is the archaeology. The spread of Indo-European, mapped by where its daughter tongues turn up, radiates from the steppe in the right order and at the right times to match the movement of the Yamnaya.

The third is the DNA. The branches of Europe carrying the most steppe ancestry are, in the main, the ones speaking Indo-European. The Basques, who speak the one surviving European language outside the family, carry less of it.

None of the three alone carries the claim. Languages can be reconstructed but not placed. Archaeology shows movement but not speech. DNA shows ancestry but not words. Together they make the steppe the strongest candidate for the source of Indo-European. Most scholars hold to it, though the exact homeland and route are argued at the edges, and it remains a reconstruction, not a recording.

VI.2 The Corded Ware

From around 3000 BC the Yamnaya moved west off the steppe into farming Europe. The first culture to appear carrying this steppe ancestry is the Corded Ware, named after its pottery: round-bottomed beakers with patterns made by pressing twisted cord into the wet clay before firing. The graves hold polished stone battle-axes, carefully shaped and perforated for hafting, and each body lies alone in its own pit under a small mound, a burial practice brought from the steppe. In Scandinavia the same culture is called the Battle-Axe culture, after the same graves named from a different artefact.

Studies beginning in 2015 found the Corded Ware people drew as much as three-quarters of their ancestry from a Yamnaya-like source. The evidence pulls two ways. The overall ancestry says the Corded Ware are largely of steppe origin. The male line says otherwise. Yamnaya men in the graves almost all carry one Y-chromosome lineage, called R1b. Most Corded Ware men carry a different one, R1a. A people descended straight down the male line from the Yamnaya already sampled should carry the Yamnaya Y-chromosome, and the Corded Ware largely do not. The steppe ancestry is there. How it arrived is not settled. The Corded Ware came by some more tangled route, from steppe or forest-steppe populations not yet pinned down.

VI.3 The Bell Beaker

A second Bronze Age culture spread across the west soon after, named for a tall, bell-shaped drinking vessel, finely made, often banded with geometric pattern. This is the Bell Beaker. The graves hold copper daggers (later bronze), stone wrist-guards for archery, and gold ornaments. The Bell Beaker spread from Iberia across western and central Europe, and wherever it went, steppe ancestry came with it.

In Iberia the steppe layer left a sharper mark than anywhere. By around 2000 BC, roughly forty percent of the peninsula’s ancestry traced to the steppe. Among men, nearly all the local Y-chromosome lineages had been replaced by steppe ones, around ninety percent.

Overall ancestry counts all forebears. The Y-chromosome counts only the unbroken line from father to son. When two peoples merge peacefully over generations, both figures land somewhere in the middle. When the overall ancestry shifts partway but the male line is almost wholly replaced, one group’s men fathered nearly all the children and the other group’s men mostly did not. The researchers read this as steppe-descended men, holding more power or higher standing, fathering far more of the following generations than the local men did, across centuries, and not peacefully. How much was violence, how much coercion, how much the powerful taking the mates, cannot be read from bones and DNA. David Reich, whose lab produced much of the data, says only that it “cannot have been entirely friendly,” and points to “extraordinary hierarchies and imbalances in power.”

The Yamnaya were themselves a mixture of two older populations before they ever moved. Everywhere they went they mixed again, with farmers who were themselves a mixture of earlier farmers and hunter-gatherers. There is no pure European stock anywhere in this story, at any layer. A shared language is not a shared bloodline: the Yamnaya gave much of Europe its languages and only part of its ancestry, and the two do not track each other.

Pale skin did not arrive with any of these layers. The gene variants behind light European skin stayed uncommon for thousands of years after the farmers came, rose slowly through the Bronze and Iron Ages, and became widespread only late. Dark and intermediate skin were still ordinary in Europe as recently as three thousand years ago. Pale skin spread by natural selection through populations already thoroughly mixed. Why it spread, sunlight and vitamin D being the usual explanation, is not fully settled. It marks no lineage.

The steppe herders did not stay one people. Once settled across Europe, their descendants formed regional cultures through the later Bronze Age, each with its own pottery, metalwork, and way of burying the dead, and it is from these that the named peoples of the Iron Age grew. A few of these Bronze Age cultures matter for what follows.

VI.4 Urnfield

The largest was the Urnfield culture, which spread across central Europe from around 1300 BC. It takes its name from its dead: instead of burying bodies, its people burned them and placed the ashes in pottery urns, set in great cemeteries, the urn fields. Urnfield is the trunk from which several later peoples branched. In its central-European heartland it grew into the Iron Age Celtic cultures, first Hallstatt and then La Tène, which we will meet in a moment. Its southern offshoots crossed into Italy and became the Villanovan culture, the root of the Italic peoples and, in Tuscany, of the Etruscans. So the Celts and the Italics share a Bronze Age grandparent in the Urnfield culture, then went their separate ways.

In the north, across southern Scandinavia and the German plain, a different regional culture developed, the Nordic Bronze Age. Out of it, as the Iron Age came in, grew the Jastorf culture, the culture of the early Germanic peoples, just as Urnfield in the south grew into Hallstatt and La Tène. And in the southeast, on the Greek mainland and the Aegean, the steppe wave had already produced something more advanced still: the Mycenaean civilization, the palace culture of around 1600 BC that was the Bronze Age face of the Greeks. So by the end of the Bronze Age the steppe wave had sorted itself into the regional cultures that would, in the Iron Age, become the peoples we can finally name: Urnfield in the centre giving rise to the Celts and the Italics, the Nordic Bronze Age in the north giving rise through Jastorf to the Germanic peoples, and the Mycenaeans in the southeast standing at the head of the Greeks.

Where to see them: sites and museums

These are met differently from the farmers. The steppe peoples built few monuments and no towns; their mark is the grave, the burial mound and what was placed in it, and their finest legacy is metalwork. So the experience is largely a museum one, and the great collections are in Central Europe, not the west.

• The Yamnaya (the steppe herders themselves) are the hardest to visit.
  • Their monuments are the kurgans, the burial mounds that still dot the grasslands of Ukraine and southern Russia by the thousand, but these lie across the eastern steppe, far from accessible museums, and few are developed for visitors. For most travellers the Yamnaya are best met not at a mound but in a museum’s ancient-DNA and migration display, where they appear as the third great wave. Their material is held in Ukrainian and Russian museums.
• The Corded Ware (their northern heirs, named for cord-marked pots and stone battle-axes) are best seen in the archaeology museums of Central and northern Europe, where their single graves, each body alone under a small mound with its beaker and axe, are displayed.
  • The Moravian Museum (Brno),
  • the National Museum (Prague), and
  • German state archaeology museums hold fine collections.
• The Bell Beaker (named for the bell-shaped drinking cups, the wave that swept Britain) are found across western and central Europe, and their distinctive beakers, copper daggers, and archers’ wrist-guards fill many museums.
  • In Britain the Amesbury Archer, the richest Beaker burial ever found, is displayed at the Salisbury Museum, near Stonehenge, and is the best single Beaker grave you can see.
• The Urnfield culture (the late Bronze Age people who cremated their dead in urn cemeteries, ancestors of the Celts and Italics) is met through its urns and bronze work in Central European museums, and it leads directly into the Iron Age Hallstatt culture that grew from it.
• The one great object to see: the Nebra Sky Disc, in the State Museum of Prehistory, Halle, Germany. This bronze disc inlaid with gold sun, moon, and stars, made around 1600 BC, is the oldest known depiction of the cosmos anywhere in the world, a product of the Bronze Age world the steppe wave had made. It is one of the most extraordinary prehistoric objects in Europe, and a UNESCO “Memory of the World” item.

If you want the Bronze Age world in one place, go to the State Museum of Prehistory in Halle, Germany. It holds the Nebra Sky Disc and one of the richest Bronze Age collections in Europe, and it sits in the heart of the region where the Corded Ware, the Bell Beaker, and the Urnfield cultures all left their dead and their metalwork. Central Germany, not Britain, is the true centre of this world: the meeting ground where the steppe wave, settling into Europe, became the cultures that led on to the Celts, the Germani, and the Italics.

VII. The Iron Age

Iron working, like bronze and copper before it, came from the east. The Hittites of Anatolia were among the earliest large-scale ironworkers, and the technology spread westward, hand to hand, across peoples already settled. Iron was harder than bronze, more widely available, and cheaper. It changed what a farmer could clear and what a warrior could carry. By the time iron reached central and western Europe, around 800 BC, the peoples we can name were beginning to form.

VII.1 Hallstatt

The first named Iron Age culture of central Europe is the Hallstatt, after a village in the Austrian Alps where a vast ancient salt-mining complex was found alongside a cemetery of over a thousand graves. What defines it: iron swords (the long, slashing kind), four-wheeled wagons placed in the burial chamber with the dead, bronze vessels imported from the Mediterranean, and the salt mines themselves. The Hallstatt culture ran from about 800 to 450 BC, from Austria to eastern France, and it is considered the first recognizable Celtic culture, though whether the people who mined the salt called themselves Celts is unknown.

VII.2 La Tène

From around 450 BC a new style spread from the region around Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland. It is named the La Tène, after the lakeside site where its artefacts were first pulled from the water. What sets it apart from Hallstatt is the art: a flowing, curvilinear ornament of spirals and tendrils and stylized animals, worked into metalwork, swords, shields, brooches, and torcs (neck rings). La Tène people used two-wheeled chariots rather than four-wheeled wagons and carried longer iron swords. They spread the Celtic-speaking world from Ireland to Anatolia. The La Tène is the later Celtic culture, the one the Romans met, and it ran until the Roman conquest ended it.

VII.3 Uralic north

Three layers made the body of Europe: the hunter-gatherers, the Anatolian farmers, the steppe herders. Almost every European carries all three, in proportions that shift from place to place, more steppe and hunter-gatherer to the north and east, more farmer to the south.

The far north kept a fourth strand, and though it is the thinnest of the four, it is a true peopling in its own right. In Finland, in Estonia and Karelia, and across Arctic Scandinavia there is an ancestry the other three never carried, a Siberian one, present in the genomes of the northern peoples and absent everywhere further south. It came late and from far away. A study published in 2025 traced it to the northeast of Siberia, around Yakutia, and followed it westward across the millennia, reaching Karelia about 3,500 years ago and the eastern Baltic about 2,600 years ago, long after the farmers and the steppe herders had settled the rest of the continent.

It arrived carrying its own languages, the Uralic tongues, Finnish, Estonian, and Sami among them. These are not Indo-European. They belong to a wholly separate family that came out of the east, and to an ear tuned to the Indo-European languages that cover the rest of Europe they sound like nothing else on the continent, unrelated to English, French, Russian, or Greek. A speaker of Finnish and a speaker of Italian share almost no common linguistic root at all. This is the clearest living trace of the fourth peopling: a scatter of languages in the north and northeast that simply do not belong to the great Indo-European family, and never did.

That same deep Siberian source is connected, far back, to the population that first peopled the Americas, not the same people, but a distant shared root in the ancient Siberian north, two branches from one cold and long-vanished world, one turning east across the land bridge into a new continent, the other turning west into the top of Europe thousands of years later. It is a fourth peopling, faint in the blood but unmistakable in the language, and it is why the north of Europe has always stood a little apart from the rest.

Where to see them: sites and museums

Both Celtic cultures are named after the exact places you can still visit, which is unusual and satisfying: the site is the name.

• The Hallstatt culture
  • Hallstatt, in the Salzkammergut, Austria (UNESCO). The World Heritage Museum (Museum Hallstatt) holds the great collection from the Iron Age salt-miners’ cemetery that gave the culture its name, and the Salzwelten salt mine above the town, the oldest in the world, can be toured underground, where the salt preserved the miners’ tools, clothing, and even their packs. The Celtic salt wealth and the graves are both here, in one spectacular lakeside valley. Access: Hallstatt is a tiny, crowded village with tight access; park outside and walk in, or arrive by the lake.
• The La Tène culture (the later Iron Age Celts, the flowing art and the chariots) takes its name from La Tène, on Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where the finds were dredged from the lake.
  • The Laténium, near Neuchâtel, is the great museum of the culture, Switzerland’s largest archaeology museum, built beside the site itself, with a reconstruction of the lakeside bridge where the offerings (and skulls) were found. This is the place to see La Tène art and the Celtic world at its height. Access: own parking, on the lake shore near Neuchâtel.
• The Uralic peoples (the fourth strand, the Sami and Finns) are best met in the far north.
  • Siida, the National Museum of the Finnish Sami in Inari, Finland, is the finest place to understand the Sami, the reindeer people of the Arctic, their language, and their way of life. For the Finnic peoples more broadly,
  • the National Museum of Finland (Helsinki) and the
  • Estonian National Museum (Tartu), a striking modern building devoted to Finno-Ugric culture, are the anchors. These are living cultures, not ruins, so the “sites” are museums of a people still here, not excavations of a vanished one. Access: all have their own parking; Inari is remote, deep in Finnish Lapland.

If you want one place for each: Hallstatt (Austria) for the early Celts, salt mine and museum in one valley; the Laténium (Switzerland) for the later Celts; and Siida (Finnish Lapland) for the Uralic north. The two Celtic sites are a natural pair, both alpine, both named for the spot you stand on; the Uralic one is a journey to the Arctic, fitting for the strand that came from furthest away.

VIII. Summary of the Homo Sapiens Occupation Waves of Europe

Four waves, across forty thousand years, built the European population.

From about 45,000 years ago came the hunter-gatherers of the Old Stone Age. The first modern humans, once called the Cro-Magnons, made the Aurignacian tools and carved the earliest art; their descendants, the Gravettians, hunted the mammoth and carved the Venus figures. When the ice reached its worst they fell back into the southern refuges, and there they split, the Magdalenians in the west, in Iberia and France, who painted Lascaux and Altamira, and the Epigravettians in the southeast, in Italy and the Balkans. As the ice drew back the Epigravettians spread north and largely replaced the Magdalenians, and their heirs, the Western Hunter-Gatherers, held the whole continent by around 12,000 years ago, dark-skinned and often blue-eyed. To the east lived their cousins the Eastern Hunter-Gatherers, who carried a strand of Siberian ancestry the west never had, because the east lay open to the steppe road while the west was walled by sea.

From about 6,500 BC came the Anatolian farmers of the New Stone Age, entering through the Balkans and spreading by two roads, the Mediterranean coast and the inland Danube. They brought the whole farming package, the crops and the animals and the settled village, and over two and a half thousand years they replaced or absorbed the hunter-gatherers across most of the continent.

From about 3,000 BC came the steppe herders of the Bronze Age, out of the grasslands north of the Black Sea. The Yamnaya and their heirs the Corded Ware and the Bell Beaker spread west and north with the horse, the wheel, the wagon, and the Indo-European language that most of Europe still speaks. Settling into their regions, they formed the great Bronze Age cultures, the Urnfield in the centre and the Nordic Bronze Age in the north, from which the later peoples would grow.

From about 1,500 BC, and continuing for centuries after, a fourth and thinner strand reached the far north out of Siberia, carrying the Uralic languages, Finnish, Estonian, and Sami, which belong to no Indo-European family and sound like nothing else in Europe.

From about 800 BC came the Iron Age, and with it the peoples we can finally name. Out of the Bronze Age cultures they grew: the Celts from the Hallstatt and La Tène cultures in the center, the Italics and Etruscans from the Villanovan in Italy, the Germanic peoples from the Jastorf in the north, the Greeks from their Mycenaean roots in the Aegean. Almost all of them were the steppe wave, settled and drifted into separate tongues and homelands.

Every European alive is a mixture of the first three waves; the northerners carry all four. That is the raw material. What follows is how it settled into the peoples we know.

IX. From the waves to the peoples

People descendants from all those four waves farmed. Wheat, barley, sheep, goats, the settled village, the cleared field, the inheritance of the Anatolian wave. A Greek, a Celt, a Slav, a Germanic tribe all lived off the same package that walked in from Anatolia. They nearly all had the horse, the wheel, and the wagon, the inheritance of the steppe, and nearly all spoke an Indo-European language, whose shared root-words for horse and wheel and wagon are the steppe ancestry carried in speech. They worked bronze, and then iron. Both metals came from the east, passed hand to hand across peoples already settled.

What differs between them is not which waves they received, since nearly all received all three, but how much of each. The proportions shift across the continent. The table below gives approximate figures for the ancestry of modern populations in each region, drawn from the major genome studies. These are not measurements of the ancient named peoples but of their modern descendants, region by region. The numbers shift by five or ten percent between studies, so they show the shape of the gradient, not precision to the decimal.

Modern population	Hunter-Gatherer	Farmer (Anatolian)	Steppe	Siberian / Uralic
Sardinian	~7%	~90%	~3%	—
Basque	~10%	~75%	~15%	—
Spanish	~10%	~60%	~25%	—
French	~10%	~55%	~30%	—
English	~15%	~40%	~40%	—
German	~10%	~40%	~45%	—
Scandinavian	~20%	~35%	~40%	trace
Lithuanian	~15%	~30%	~50%	trace
Russian	~10%	~30%	~45%	~10%
Finnish	~15%	~25%	~30%	~25%
Sami	~10%	~15%	~20%	~50%

A Sardinian, on an island the later movements mostly passed by, is nine parts in ten of Anatolian farmer ancestry. A Finn carries nearly equal shares of three layers plus a quarter Siberian. A German or an English person sits roughly in the middle, farmer and steppe in near-equal measure. The same three or four ingredients in different proportions.

The Basques are a case often told wrong. They did not miss a wave. They received all three layers, steppe included, like their neighbours. What sets them apart is that they received the ancient waves and then, around the Iron Age, stopped mixing. The Romans, the later migrations that reshaped Iberia, the centuries of movement that blended everyone else, the Basques in their mountain corner took almost none of it. They are a pocket of pre-Roman Iberia held still while the rest kept changing, and their language is the pre-Indo-European tongue that stillness preserved. The Sami of the far north are a different kind of exception: they carry the Siberian strand of the Uralic wave, an ancestry the south never received.

If these peoples shared so much, how did they become separate peoples at all?

They settled, and then they drifted. People who keep moving keep meeting and mixing with other groups. A hunter follows the game, a herder follows the grass, and neither stays put long enough to become a fixed community. A farmer cannot leave the field. Farming holds people on one patch of ground, generation after generation, and with it come the village, the town, the bounded field, the kin-group tied to its place. A population that sits still in its own region drifts from the region next to it.

What it drifts into is a different language and a different way of living, though the blood stays much the same. A language is learned, not inherited: a child speaks what it hears, not what is in its blood. Cut the daily contact between one settled place and the next, and their speech parts. In a connected world we live now this is hard to picture, but it does not take ancient history to see it. Italy kept dialects into the last century that a Sicilian and a Milanese could not use to understand one another, in a single country, with roads and trade and a shared state. Germany was much the same. Local costume, festival, food, and dialect split valley by valley, in countries no bigger than a few hundred miles across. Take that same drift, and instead of a few centuries give it thousands of years, among smaller and more isolated groups, with no writing to hold a tongue in place and no center to pull it back. Dialects become separate languages, and separate languages come to mark separate peoples. Latin did it: left in the different provinces of a fallen empire, it became French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian, one tongue turned to many with no new blood. The Indo-European the steppe had carried did the same across the continent, settling into the Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Slavic, and Baltic branches.

Custom parts the same way. Speech and custom are both learned and passed on locally, so both follow contact, and contact is governed by geography. Distance thins it. A mountain wall or a sea cuts it. A people closed in a hard corner stays distinct. A people spread over open country blurs into its neighbours. The region a people settled is not just where it was, but much of why it became what it became.

What distinguished one people from another by the Iron Age was not blood, since underneath they carried the same three-layer mixture, and not technology, since they all farmed, worked iron, and kept horses. What distinguished them was the things that had drifted: the branch of Indo-European they spoke, the style of their metalwork and pottery, the way they buried their dead, the gods they honoured, and the way they organized power. A Celtic community in Gaul, a Germanic tribe on the north German plain, and a Greek city-state on the Aegean all farmed, forged iron, and rode horses. They looked different from one another because of centuries of separated custom, not because of different origins.

What kept them separate once formed is a harder question, and geography is only part of the answer. Mountains and seas and forests divided some from others, and distance thinned contact across open country. But peoples also kept apart because they competed. Farming populations need land, and land is finite. Neighboring groups competed for the best farmland, for pasture, for water, for salt, for the ores that made bronze and iron. The Iron Age is full of hillforts, ditched enclosures, and weapons placed in graves. Caesar, when he arrived in Gaul, found the tribes at war with one another as often as with outsiders. Tacitus described the same among the Germani. Cattle-raiding, border skirmishing, and competition for trade routes are visible in the archaeology long before any literate observer wrote them down.

Competition hardened identity. A group that has its own language, its own customs, its own gods, and a territory it defends against its neighbors comes to define itself by the boundary. Marriage tended to stay within the group, which reinforced the distinctness over generations. Trade crossed the boundaries freely: Mediterranean bronze vessels turn up in Hallstatt graves a thousand miles from where they were made. But the people on either side of the boundary stayed distinct, trading goods without trading identity.

The peoples were held apart by three things working together: geography, which set the initial drift; competition over land and resources, which gave them reason to stay apart; and identity itself, which once formed became self-reinforcing.

X. The peoples

Up to now this has been a line of arrivals: the hunter-gatherers in the Palaeolithic, the farmers in the Neolithic, the steppe in the Bronze Age. From here the story is peoples forming in place, out of the same mixture, and the dates turn soft. Becoming a distinct people has no single moment the way crossing a sea or land does; the dates below are rough marks for “recognizable by about then,” not events.

The peoples named below are not countries. The countries came later, most of them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drawn around ethnic groups that were already there. Some of the names will sound like modern states, and that is not a coincidence: the states were named after the peoples, not the other way around. This is most visible in the Slavic and Baltic entries, where the ethnic communities settled their regions late, stayed in them, and the modern borders were eventually drawn to match. Among the Celtic and Germanic peoples the pattern is different: most of those daughter-peoples moved, conquered, mixed, and lost their names to the places they passed through. France is named after the Franks, not the Gauls who lived there before them. England is named after the Angles, who crossed the sea from Denmark. The names in the brackets below are peoples, not places.

With a few exceptions, these peoples are the steppe wave settled down. They descend from the Bronze Age herders, the Yamnaya and their Corded Ware and Bell Beaker heirs, who spread across Europe, put down roots in different regions, and drifted apart into the different branches of the one Indo-European language they had carried. The Italics, the Greeks, the Germanic peoples, the Balts, the Slavs, the Celts, and the peoples of the Balkans are all, at bottom, that steppe wave in different valleys speaking increasingly different tongues. The exceptions kept older languages from before the steppe arrived: the Basques and the Etruscans in the south and west, and, in the far north, the Uralic-speaking Sami and Finns, whose tongue came not from the steppe but from Siberia, the fourth strand.

There is one more thing to understand before naming them. These peoples did not name themselves, or if they did, the names are lost, because they did not write. They were named by others. The first to do it were the Greeks, who from about 500 BC wrote down the peoples they traded with and heard of, the Celts to their northwest, the Scythians on the eastern grasslands. Then came the Romans, who named far more, and far more systematically, because they conquered and governed most of the continent and needed to know who everyone was. Caesar named the Gauls and the Germani; Tacitus described the tribes of the north in detail. Almost every name in this section is a Greek or Roman word for a people who left no written name of their own. This is the threshold the whole account has been moving toward: the moment the unwritten peoples of prehistory step, one by one, onto the page of somebody else’s history. Here they are:

The Basques — the western Pyrenees, on both slopes. The great exception. They carry the same three-layer ancestry as their neighbours, hunter-gatherer, farmer, and steppe alike, but they kept a language from before the Indo-European wave arrived, the only such language still spoken in Europe. Basque is related to no other living tongue. They did not miss the steppe wave; they took its genes but kept their own older speech, and in their mountains it survived where everywhere else it was lost. Unwritten until the Romans describe them. (No daughter-peoples; the Basques are their own root, and their modern descendants, on both sides of the French-Spanish border, still speak the old tongue.)

The Celts — central Europe, around the Alps and the upper Danube, from about 800 BC, spreading west and out. The people of the two Iron Age cultures we have already met, the Hallstatt and then the La Tène. Their tongue was the Celtic branch of Indo-European, so they are the steppe wave settled in the centre of the continent. Whether they were ever one people is doubtful; the DNA shows local populations across a wide region taking up a shared language and style, not one folk on the march. (The Celtic world breaks into many peoples the later posts will meet: in Gaul the Aedui, Arverni, and Helvetii among dozens of tribes; in Britain the Britons proper, split into the Iceni, Brigantes, Catuvellauni, Trinovantes, and more; the Gaels of Ireland and, later, of Scotland; the Celtiberians of Iberia; and the Galatians who wandered all the way to Anatolia. Of these the Gaels and the Welsh, Cornish, and Breton descendants of the Britons still speak Celtic tongues today.)

The Italics — the Italian peninsula, from about 1,000 BC. Their roots reach back to the Urnfield culture, the late Bronze Age people of central Europe who buried their dead in urn cemeteries and whose southern offshoots moved into Italy; the Urnfield culture was itself part of the Bronze Age world the steppe wave had made. So the Italics are that same steppe wave settled in Italy, speaking an Italic branch of Indo-European. (Within this family the Latins, the Oscans, the Umbrians, the Samnites, and the Sabines, of whom one small people on the Tiber, the Latins of Rome, would in time absorb all the others and give their tongue, Latin, to half the world.)

The Greeks — the Aegean: the Greek mainland, the islands, and the western coast of Anatolia. Their steppe-descended, Indo-European ancestors reached Greece in the Bronze Age and built the Mycenaean civilization, the palace culture of around 1600 BC that stands at the start of the Greek story. Mountains and islands then split the Greek world into many communities with their own dialects. They reached writing, lost it when the Mycenaean palaces fell around 1200 BC, passed through centuries of silence, then took an alphabet from the Phoenicians and stepped out of prehistory by about 750 BC. Among the first Europeans to write about themselves, and so among the first to leave this account. (Within this family the Ionians, Dorians, and Aeolians of the city-states, the Athenians and Spartans among them, and later the Macedonians of the north who would carry Greek culture to the edge of India.)

The Thracians, Illyrians, and Dacians — the Balkans, the great mountainous southeast, from about 700 BC. Three related peoples, all Indo-European, all branches of the steppe wave settled in the Balkan lands: the Thracians in the east, in what is now Bulgaria and beyond, the Illyrians down the west along the Adriatic, and the Dacians in the north, around the Carpathians. The Greeks and then the Romans wrote about them, traded with them, fought them, and in the end absorbed most of them into the empire. Their languages are barely recorded and now lost, so they are known more from the outside than from within. (The Thracians included the Getae and the Odrysae; Rome made a whole province, Dacia, out of the Dacian lands, and modern Romania still carries its Latin from it; and the Illyrians are often thought to be the ancestors of the Albanians, whose language may be their last surviving descendant.)

The Germanic peoples — southern Scandinavia and the north German plain, between the Rhine and the Vistula, recognizable from around 500 BC. They emerge from the Jastorf culture, the Iron Age culture of northern Germany and Jutland that most scholars accept as the Germanic homeland; it grew out of the older Nordic Bronze Age and bordered, and borrowed from, the Celtic Hallstatt culture to its south. So the Germanic peoples are the steppe wave settled in the north, their tongue another Indo-European branch. When Rome first named them, around Caesar’s time, they were one broad group of many small tribes, the Cherusci, the Chatti, the Suebi, the Marcomanni, the Frisii; the famous daughter-peoples split off and took their own names only later, in the turmoil of the following centuries. Unwritten until Rome reached the Rhine and Tacitus described the tribes beyond it around 100 AD. (From this family come the Goths, who split into the Visigoths of Iberia and the Ostrogoths of Italy; the Vandals, who crossed all the way to North Africa; the Franks, who took Gaul and gave France its name; the Burgundians and the Lombards; the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who crossed the sea to become the English; the Alemanni, whose name became the French word for Germany; and, in Scandinavia, the Norse, who as the Vikings raided from 793, settled Iceland and much of Britain and Ireland, and, as one branch settling in France, became the Normans who took England in 1066.)

The Balts — the southeastern Baltic coast, distinct from around 500 BC. Their living tongues, Lithuanian and Latvian, are the most old-fashioned Indo-European languages alive, closer to the reconstructed parent than any other, which makes them precious to linguists. They are the steppe wave settled on the Baltic and left long undisturbed. Which exact archaeological culture they grew from, among the forest cultures of the region, is genuinely debated and far less clear-cut than the Germanic or Celtic case, an honest gap rather than a tidy link. They stayed in place, and stayed unwritten, very late. (Within this family the Lithuanians and the Latvians, who endure as nations still, and the Old Prussians, whose land later took a Germanic name and whose own tongue died out.)

The Slavs — the last of the large settled European peoples to form, in the region of southern Belarus and northern and central Ukraine, coalescing around 300 to 500 AD. Like the Balts, they are a late-settling branch of the steppe wave, and the close kinship of their language to Baltic suggests the two shared a homeland for a long time before parting. Their archaeological origin was argued over for a century, partly because it became tangled with modern nationalism, but a genome study in 2025 placed the homeland in that region and showed a real, large-scale migration outward in the sixth to eighth centuries AD, across the eastern plain, into central Europe, and down into the Balkans. Not a people who had always been everywhere they now are, but a movement out of one place, late and fast. Byzantine writers were describing them almost as soon as they appeared. (They divide into three great branches the later posts will follow: the East Slavs, ancestors of the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians; the West Slavs, the Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks; and the South Slavs, the Serbs, Croats, Bulgarians, and others of the Balkans.)

The Scythians and Sarmatians — the open grasslands of the eastern edge, from about 800 BC. Horse peoples of the steppe, speaking an Iranian tongue, a branch of Indo-European from further east, cousins of the Persians. They were never settled farmers in the European sense but ranged the plains north of the Black Sea with their herds. The Greeks knew the Scythians well, Herodotus wrote a great deal about them, and the Sarmatians followed them on the same grasslands. They mark the eastern doorway of Europe, the open end of the continent, where the steppe ran on into Asia, and it is down that same road that the last arrivals would come. (Among them the Sarmatian Alans rode as far west as Gaul and Iberia in the great migrations, the last of the old Iranian steppe peoples to leave a mark in Europe.)

The Etruscans — west-central Italy, in what is now Tuscany, with cities from about 800 BC, growing out of the local Villanovan culture, the early-Iron-Age society of the same region. The other great exception. Like the Basques, they were a local people who kept a non-Indo-European language while Indo-European spread around them, and their DNA matches their Italian neighbours, so they were not incomers from the east, whatever the ancient Greeks believed. They built the first cities of Italy, before Rome, and wrote in an alphabet we can read letter by letter without understanding, because the language behind it belongs to no known family. Their writing brings them to the very edge of this account. (They left no daughter-peoples; Rome absorbed the Etruscan cities one by one, and their language died with them, but their alphabet, passed to the Latins, is the ancestor of the one on this page.)

The Sami and the Finns — the far north, across Arctic Scandinavia, Finland, and Karelia. These are the peoples of the fourth strand, the ones who carry the Uralic languages out of Siberia rather than the Indo-European tongue of the steppe. The Sami, the reindeer people of the Arctic, and the Finnic peoples around the northeast corner of the Baltic speak languages related to no others in Europe except each other, and to Hungarian far to the south. They are the living edge of that thin Siberian peopling, and the reason the top of the continent has always sounded, and stood, apart. (Within this family the Sami of Arctic Lapland; the Finns; the Estonians; and the Karelians and other smaller Finnic peoples of the northeast.)

The Picts — northern Britain, above the Firth of Forth. Medieval writers gave them exotic origins, from Scythia, from Thrace, from far northern islands, and their carved symbol-stones fed the legend. Genomes published in 2023 settled it: the Picts descended from the local Iron Age population of Britain, the same steppe-and-earlier mixture as their neighbours, no incomers at all. Like every block on the map, “Picts” is a lid over many smaller peoples: the Romans named the Caledonii along the Great Glen, the Maeatae near the Antonine Wall, and the Taexali, Vacomagi, Venicones, and others scattered across the north, before the single word “Picts” was ever used of them. Their closest living relatives are the people of western Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Northumbria. (In time the Picts merged with the Gaels of Dál Riata under Kenneth MacAlpin to form the kingdom of Alba, which became Scotland.)

The Late Arrivals

All those above were the four waves settled into place, and the Greeks and Romans found them there and gave them names. But the grassland corridor that had first brought the steppe herders never closed, and down it, long after the waves were done and the peoples had formed, came a last run of riders out of the east. They arrived when writing had already reached the edges of Europe, so they were recorded from the moment they appeared, not because the continent could read, most of it still could not, but because the literate world of the Mediterranean and Byzantium was there to write them down.

Most of them passed through. The Huns swept in from Central Asia around 375 AD, shattered the Gothic and Roman order, and broke apart within a lifetime. The Avars followed in the sixth century and ruled the Hungarian plain for a time before they too faded. The Bulgars, a Turkic people, arrived in the seventh century and gave their name to Bulgaria, but were absorbed into the Slavs already living there and took up a Slavic tongue, so that today the Bulgarians are a Slavic people with a Turkic name. These were storms that passed, leaving marks but no lasting people of their own.

One stayed. The Magyars rode in around 900 AD and settled the Hungarian plain for good, and their descendants are the Hungarians. They carried a Uralic language, from the same far-northern family as Finnish and the Sami tongue, and they planted it in the heart of the continent, an island of Uralic speech surrounded on every side by Indo-European neighbours. They came by a completely different road from the northern Uralic peoples, straight across the steppe rather than down from the Arctic, and their language in the middle of Europe is the last strange echo of that fourth strand out of Siberia.

The Historical Arrivals

The peopling did not stop when the record opened; it only became something we can read about directly. Inside written history, well after the four waves and the riders of the steppe, more peoples came and stayed, and they belong here too, because they became part of the fabric of Europe as surely as any wave before them. The only difference is that these arrived with historians already watching, so their stories are known in full, and this account can do no more than point to them before handing them on.

The largest was the arrival of Islam in the west. In 711 AD, Arab and Berber armies from North Africa, the people later called the Moors, crossed at Gibraltar and conquered almost the whole Iberian peninsula. They did not pass through. They stayed for nearly eight hundred years, until the last Muslim kingdom, Granada, fell in 1492. For most of that time much of Spain and Portugal was a Muslim land, Al-Andalus, one of the most learned and sophisticated societies in the medieval world, and it left a permanent mark on the language, the architecture, the food, and the blood of the peninsula. “Moor,” like so many names in this account, was a label given from outside, not one the newcomers used of themselves.

In the southeast, the same religion arrived from the other direction. The Ottoman Turks, a people out of Anatolia, pushed into the Balkans from the middle of the fourteenth century and ruled much of southeastern Europe for four, five, in places six centuries. They left behind Muslim populations who are Europeans still, the Bosniaks and many Albanians among them, and a Turkish and Islamic layer laid over the old Thracian and Illyrian and Slavic ground.

Two more peoples of historical time belonged to no single country, and for that reason they cannot be drawn on a map of territories at all; they lived dispersed, as minorities, within the lands of everyone else. The Jews had lived across Europe since Roman times and earlier, in Iberia as the Sephardim, in the Rhineland and Poland and the east as the Ashkenazim, a people present for well over a thousand years, central to the life of the continent and repeatedly persecuted in it, down to the catastrophe of the twentieth century. The Roma came later, reaching Europe from the northwest of the Indian subcontinent around the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, carrying an Indo-Aryan language from the far side of the Indo-European world; they too became a European people, scattered across the whole continent and nowhere its majority. Neither held a territory of its own, and that is precisely the point about them: they were woven through the map rather than drawn on it.

These arrivals are not prehistory, and this is not their account. But to end at the Magyars and say the peopling of Europe was finished would be false. The continent went on receiving peoples throughout its recorded history, as it does today. What changed at the threshold was not that the arrivals stopped, but that they passed out of the reach of bones and stones and into the reach of the written record, which is to say, out of this account and into history.

That is the line this whole story has been moving toward. The peoples were in place; one by one they began to appear not only in the ground but on the page. The tool that carried them across, writing itself, came from the east like so much else in this account. It was invented in Mesopotamia around 3400 BC. The first Europeans to use it were the Mycenaean Greeks, who kept records in a script called Linear B from around 1400 BC, lost it when their palaces fell around 1200 BC, and came back to writing around 800 BC with an alphabet borrowed from the Phoenician traders of the eastern Mediterranean. The Greeks passed that alphabet to the Etruscans, the Etruscans to the Latins, and Rome carried it across the west; a thousand years later Greek missionaries built the Cyrillic script for the Slavs out of the same Greek letters. The words on this page trace back, hand to hand, to Phoenician merchants on the Lebanese coast. Even the tool that ends prehistory was an import from the east.

A people crossed the line in one of two ways. Some learned to write and passed into history by their own hand, the Greeks by about 750 BC, the Etruscans by 700, the Latins by 600. The rest never wrote, but were pulled into the record when a literate neighbour set them down, the Gauls and the Germani by Caesar and Tacitus, the Scythians by Herodotus, the Slavs by the Byzantines. To be described by an outside writer is to stand at the threshold, half in prehistory still; to write your own name, or to act in a dated event like Caesar’s crossing into Gaul, is to have stepped across it.

And there this account ends, because there its subject ends. For tens of thousands of years there were no peoples with names, only tools in the ground and, later, ancestry in the bones. Four waves built the population, the hunter-gatherers, the farmers, the steppe herders, and the thin Siberian strand of the north. They settled and drifted into the peoples named here; the riders of the steppe came after them; and later still, in the full light of written history, came the Moors, the Ottomans, the Jews, and the Roma. That is the raw material of Europe, all of it, and the making of it is what this account has told.

What comes next is no longer the story of how the peoples came to be, but of what they did once they were here, the kingdoms, the faiths, the wars, the nations. That belongs to history, and to the separate accounts that take it up: the Greeks and the Roman world, the Celts and the Norse and the Normans, the making of the nations of Europe. Each of those is its own road, and each begins where this one stops, at the moment a people first stepped out of the silent ground and into the written record. This has been the story of how Europe was peopled. The rest is what the peopled continent went on to do.

And that is what this account is for. It is the map we carry into the anthropology and archaeology museums of Europe, and the ground we stand on when we ask how one particular place came to be peopled. Take Iceland: its story is the Norse, the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic peoples, who sailed out in the ninth century and settled an empty island, bringing with them enslaved Gaels from Ireland and the Hebrides. Both names are already in this account, the Germanic wave and the Celtic Gaels, so Iceland’s peopling is not a floating fact but the far end of a thread we have already followed. Or take England: its story is the Britons, who were Celts; then the Anglo-Saxons, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes off the Germanic homeland; then the Norse of the Viking age; and last the Normans, themselves Norse who had settled in France. Every one of those is a people met in these pages. Without them, a case in a museum, a helmet, a carved stone, a skull, is just an object under glass. With them, it takes its place in the long story of how the whole continent was peopled, and the room falls into order. That is the purpose of having gathered these names here: so that no local story ever floats free again.

Putting them on the map

The map below shows the peoples of Europe, each placed in the region it occupied and labelled with the date it first entered the written record, or, for the later arrivals, the date it came. It is best read not as a snapshot of a single moment but as a timeline laid over a map: the dates run across more than a thousand years, from the Scythians and Greeks of the eighth century BC to the Magyars of 900 AD and the Moors of 711. No one year looked like this. The Huns had come and gone long before the Magyars arrived; the Moors reached Iberia centuries after the Greeks were writing. What the map gathers is the order in which Europe’s peoples stepped out of prehistory and into the record, and roughly where each one stood when it did.

Because the map is not a single moment but a spread of dates, some of these peoples never actually shared the ground at the same time, even where their colors sit side by side, and others held the very same land one after another, centuries apart. To draw all of that truthfully, overlapping block on overlapping block, would turn the map into an unreadable tangle. Each people is given its own clear patch, positioned roughly where it belonged, and the shapes should be taken as approximate territories for locating the major groups, not as exact borders that all existed together. The map trades a little precision for the ability to see anything at all.

First, it does not show peoples who had no land of their own. The Jews, dispersed across the continent since Roman times, and the Roma, who arrived from India in the later Middle Ages, lived not in territories of their own but among all the others, in towns and quarters throughout Europe. They were as real as any people here, but they cannot be drawn as a shape on a map, and so they live in the text instead of on the map.

Second, and more important for reading the map honestly, the neat coloured blocks are a great simplification. Each one is not a single, unified nation but a broad label covering many smaller peoples who thought of themselves as separate. The green mass marked “Celts” was in truth dozens of tribes with their own names and chiefs and quarrels. The red “Germani” was scores of tribes, Cherusci, Chatti, Chauci, and many more, that Rome lumped under one word. Even a small corner like northern Britain, here marked simply “Picts,” held a scatter of peoples the Romans named separately, the Caledonii, the Maeatae, the Venicones and others, before the single name “Picts” was ever used of them; the Picts of the map are really a bundle of smaller groups seen from a distance and given one label for convenience. That is the nature of these names. They are mostly the words of outside observers, Greeks and Romans looking in from the edge, who saw broad blocks where the people themselves saw many small ones.

The map shows the blocks because that is how the record first named them, but the finer grain beneath each colour is not lost, and it is not the end of the story. Those smaller peoples, the tribes of Gaul and Germany, the many groups north of Hadrian’s Wall, will come into their own in the posts that follow, where the peopling of each country is told in close detail. There the broad block called “Celts” or “Picts” breaks apart into the real communities that made it up, each with its own name and place. This map is the wide view, drawn in the broad strokes the ancient world used; the close view, people by people and valley by valley, is what the country and other primers are for.