Greece and Rome dominate the written record, but Europe's story runs from Bronze Age traders to medieval kingdoms and the industrial states of the modern era. These articles follow the cities, wars and institutions that shaped the continent.
Footprints were exposed at Happisburgh, Norfolk, in May 2013; tides erased them within weeks. Ashton's team dated the surface to 1-0.78 million years.
· 850,000 BCAurignacian hunters drew Chauvet about 37,000 to 33,500 years ago; Lascaux was painted about 21,500 years ago. Radiocarbon on charcoal and bone says so.
· 34,000 BCGrahame Clark dug Star Carr three weeks a summer, 1949 to 1951. Excavations of 2004 to 2015 recounted the finds and dated a posthole hollow to 9300 BC.
· 9300 BCAn excavator operator found gold near Varna in October 1972. The cemetery has been counted at 270, 294, 312 and 315 graves and dated two ways.
· 4600 BCTwo hikers found a body at 3,210 meters on the Tisenjoch on September 19, 1991. A survey put it 92.56 meters inside Italy; an X-ray found an arrow.
· 3300 BCA storm around 1850 stripped a dune at the Bay of Skaill, Orkney, and bared a kitchen midden 15 or 16 feet high. Petrie, Childe and Bayliss followed.
· 2900 BCMineral grains in the Altar Stone match rock in northeast Scotland, 750 km away. The sarsens came from 25 km north, the bluestones from west Wales.
· 2500 BCArthur Evans dug at Knossos from 1900 to 1931 and rebuilt the palace in reinforced concrete, "a real godsend" to him, "controversial" to the Ashmolean.
· 1700 BCA Bronze Age town on Thera with three-story houses and drains, emptied before the eruption buried it. Radiocarbon and Egyptian dates differ by a century.
· 1600 BCA 32-centimeter bronze disc inlaid with gold stars, looted from the Mittelberg in 1999, seized in Basel in 2002 and dated to about 1600 BC.
· 1600 BCSchliemann began digging Grave Circle A at Mycenae on August 7, 1876, and wired the king in French. The "face of Agamemnon" line is not in his 1878 book.
· 1550 BCA sponge diver reported "metal biscuits with ears" off Kas in 1982; the Institute of Nautical Archaeology excavated the wreck from 1984 to 1994.
· 1300 BCAntiquity's 2019 report says a major conflagration destroyed Must Farm's Bronze Age stilt houses, whose contents sank into a Cambridgeshire river channel.
· 850 BCIn 494 BC Rome's plebeian soldiers left the city for the Sacred Mount. Livy says they came back after winning officials of their own, the tribunes.
· 494 BCAthens filled most offices, from the Council of 500 to its juries, by lottery with a stone machine, the kleroterion, to keep the rich from taking power.
· 487 BCAthens could vote once a year to exile one man for ten years, his name scratched on a pottery shard (ostracon), as a check on power, not a punishment.
· 487 BCIn 458 BC Rome made Cincinnatus dictator for six months to save a blockaded army. He resigned on the sixteenth day and, Dionysius says, refused the spoils.
· 458 BCAlexander succeeded Philip II in 336 BC, crossed to Asia in 334, beat Darius III at Issus and Gaugamela and reached the Punjab before his army turned back.
· 336 BCArrian gives Alexander 47,000 men against a Persian army 'said to contain' a million, and has Darius flee first; a Babylonian diary says he was deserted.
· 331 BCAlexander died at Babylon on June 11, 323 BC; by 280 BC his generals ruled three kingdoms, yet Greek stayed the language of eastern towns and of Bactria.
· 323 BCA lump raised from a wreck off Antikythera showed a gear wheel in 1902. X-ray studies from 2005 to 2021 read its 30 gears as an eclipse and planet machine.
· 100 BCVesuvius carbonized a Roman villa's library in AD 79. Scans and machine learning now read the scrolls unopened: a first word in 2023, a whole roll by 2026.
· AD 79Vesuvius buried Pompeii under about 4 m of ash in AD 79. Pliny dates it to August 24; Pompeii's park says the October date has no documentary basis.
· AD 79Claudia Severa's birthday invitation, tablet 291, is one of the Roman ink letters on thin wood found at the fort of Vindolanda since March 23, 1973.
· AD 100
