European Kingdoms

Early France

Palaeolithic Cultures Early Africa (Intro) Early Americas (Intro) Early Asia (Intro) Early China (Intro) Early Europe (Intro) Early Near East (Intro) Early Oceania (Intro)

The system which has evolved to catalogue the various archaeological expressions of human progress is one which involves cultures. For well over a century, archaeological cultures have remained the framework for global prehistory. The earliest cultures which emerge from Africa and the Near East are perhaps the easiest to catalogue, right up until human expansion reaches the Americas. The task of cataloguing that vast range of human cultures is covered in the related feature (see feature link, right).

The territory of Western Europe which today is contained within the borders of France had seen several phases of hominid settlement before anatomically modern humans arrived in the form of Homo sapiens, starting from an initial toehold in the south-east of Europe. Long glacial periods tended to end each phase of habitation before a marine climate could return to improve circumstances.

The first Homo sapiens arrivals have been dated to about 40,000 BC and the late Châtelperronian period, around eight millennia after the earliest habitation sites appeared in the south-eastern Europe of the Bohunician culture. These arrivals were exclusively hunter-gatherer nomads who existed in small groups, albeit with some level of networking.

The Neolithic Farming revolution arrived towards the end of the sixth millennium BC. This arrival came from two strands of Neolithic migration and culture, with both arriving at roughly the same time, around 5000-4700 BC. The northern strand was part of the Cardium Pottery culture which stretched across northern Central Europe and into the eastern Balkans.

The southern strand was introduced by island-hopping and coastal-hugging migrants from the Illyrian coast and Italy, all part of the Linear Pottery culture. They entered France from the Mediterranean coast and also expanded from there into eastern Early Iberia. Only the Bell Beaker culture in the third millennium BC would exhibit a similar expansive spread prior to the arrival of the Celts.

(Information by Peter Kessler, with additional information by Trish Wilson and Edward Dawson, from A Genetic Signal of Central European Celtic Ancestry, David K Faux, from Investigating Archaeological Cultures: Material Culture, Variability, and Transmission, Benjamin W Roberts & Marc Vander Linden (Eds), from Who were the makers of the Châtelperronian culture? O Bar-Yosef & J-G Bordes (Journal of Human Evolution, 2010), and from Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, Vol 3, Issue 1, James Cowles Prichard.)