Geography first. Until roughly 10,000 BCE, an ice sheet pinned down most of the Nordic countries and Britain. The English Channel was dry land you could walk across. Parts of what is now the North Sea were grazing grounds where mammoths fed. When the ice melted, the land that had been crushed under it began rising - and is still rising today, slowly, in Sweden and Finland, so that coastal plains that were seafloor in the Bronze Age are now wheat country. People moved north as the ice retreated. Karijoki in western Finland holds tentative evidence of pre-glacial settlement, but most of Scandinavia was empty until the Neolithic. The further north you travel in Europe, the younger the human presence.

Archaeologists divide prehistory by the materials people made their tools from, and the dates shift depending on where you are standing. The Paleolithic - the Old Stone Age - reaches back millions of years to the first human ancestors. The Mesolithic begins around 10,000 BCE as the ice retreated; it is a transitional hunting-and-gathering era, not yet farming. The Neolithic, from about 5,000 BCE, is the age of crop farming, herding, and - with it - pottery and textiles. The Bronze Age starts around 3,300 BCE in the eastern Mediterranean, the Iron Age around 1,200 BCE. But these dates lag. By the time iron working reached northern Sweden, Rome was already a republic. Technologies moved at the pace of trade networks, not centuries.

Homo neanderthalensis was native to Europe from about 200,000 BCE - a species that thrived through ice ages, hunted mammoth and bison, controlled fire, buried its dead. Anatomically modern humans arrived from the Middle East around 45,000 BCE, and within fifteen thousand years the Neanderthals were gone. They overlapped for millennia, and they interbred: most non-Africans today carry a few percent of Neanderthal DNA. You can visit the type site at the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf, where the species was first recognized in 1856. You can stand at Gibraltar's Forbes Quarry, where a Neanderthal skull was found in 1848. You can walk into the Spy Cave in Belgium, where two near-complete skeletons in 1886 finally convinced the scientific establishment that Neanderthals were real.

Around 4,000 BCE, people across western Europe began moving stones that should not have been movable. Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain is the famous one, but it is part of a much wider phenomenon stretching from Malta to Scotland. The Megalithic Temples of Malta - Ggantija on Gozo, Hagar Qim, and Mnajdra - were built between 3600 and 3000 BCE, making them among the oldest free-standing stone structures anywhere on Earth. They predate the Pyramids by a thousand years. UNESCO lists them collectively, and you can walk through them. The Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps - 111 separate Neolithic and Bronze Age lake settlements scattered across six countries - are another World Heritage site, preserving wooden houses that should have rotted millennia ago, kept alive by anaerobic mud at the lake bottoms.

People did not, mostly, live in caves. They lived in huts of wood and skin that have long since vanished. But caves preserved what open-air sites could not - bones, paintings, hearths, tools - and so the archaeological record is heavily skewed toward what survived in cool, dry darkness. The famous painted caves of Lascaux and Chauvet in France, of Altamira in Spain, were not residences but sanctuaries, deep places people walked into to make images by lamplight 17,000 to 36,000 years ago. Most are now closed to protect the pigments, but excellent replicas - Lascaux IV, Chauvet 2 - have been built nearby, painted by hand from photogrammetric scans.

Europe's first urban civilization with writing was the Minoan culture, which appeared on Crete in the 26th century BCE. The Mycenaeans displaced them around 1600 BCE and collapsed themselves around 1200 BCE. Both cultures wrote things down. The Mycenaean script, Linear B, was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris and turned out to be an early form of Greek - mostly inventories and palace accounts. The Minoan script, Linear A, has resisted every attempt at decipherment. We can pronounce some of the signs, because Linear B borrowed them, but we cannot read the language. The palace at Knossos still stands, partly rebuilt by Arthur Evans in the early 20th century in a way archaeologists now regret. The classical Greek world began in the wake of the Mycenaean collapse, and with it the continuous written record of European history.