History of rome

HISTORY OF ROME

Stone Age.

By around 200, 000 years ago, there were a few people living in Italy. We know about them from their flint axes, and from one of their villages that has been excavated west of Rome at Torrimpietra. These were not modern humans, though, but a different species of human called Homo Erectus.

More Homo Erectus people, Neanderthals, lived near Rome around 100,000years ago.

But the first people who were genetically the same as modern Italians, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, came in the Upper Paleolithic (the Old Stone Age) about 12,000 years ago (10,000 BC). These people's genetic ancestry shows that they came from West Asia. They left some more stone tools, and some engravings of animals on cave walls and on bone, but nothing as fancy as the great cave paintingsof France and Spain at this time. There must still not have been very many people in Italy.

There was a big change about 5000 BC when Neolithic (New Stone Age) people arrived in Italy. They seem to have come from Greece, in boats across the ocean, and they already had New Stone Age technology when they arrived: they knew how to farm and how to make pottery and build houses. They brought wheatwith them, and cows, and sheep. They dug ditches around their villages in southern Italy to protect themselves from wild animals and strangers. The bones of people from one of these villages, Ripa Tetta, show some interesting things: women in this village had their teeth pulled out on purpose, maybe to make themselves more beautiful (like getting a lip piercing or binding your feet). In general,they had terrible cavities in their teeth, from living so much on bread and porridge. There was a lot of violence and broken bones in the village, among both men and women. But in other ways they were healthier than later people: they got a lot of exercise through walking around, and they lived in such small groups that they didn't catch many infectious diseases.

By about 3500 BC, in the LateNeolithic, these people had gradually spread into northern Italy, even up into the Po valley. But a warming trend shortly after that made southern Italy too dry to farm, and so they gradually abandoned southern Italy and moved to the north. Some of them settled near Rome.

By 3000 BC, at the end of the Stone Age, these people began to learn how to spin and weave from their neighbors in Greece, andthey also began to trade for small pieces of metal.

Bronze Age.

The people of Italy learned to use bronze from the people of West Asia, perhaps from the Phoenicians (foy-NEE-shans), who traded with them. But bronze was very expensive. Smiths make bronze from copper and tin, and there is no tin in Italy. To get tin, you had to travel to England or to West Asia. So most people still usedstone, wood, or bone tools. Only rich people had things made of bronze.

In the Bronze Age, Italy had a lot of small independent towns, which sometimes formed themselves into leagues to fight together (as the Greeks did for the Trojan War about the same time), and sometimes did not.

Around 2000 BC Italy, like Greece and Germany, was probably invaded by Indo-Europeans coming from West Asia. Thelanguage these invaders spoke gradually became the languages of Italy: Latin, but also Oscan, Sabine, and other languages that nobody speaks anymore. These Indo-Europeans brought with them horses, the idea of the pottery wheel, and probably many other inventions as well.

Etruscans.

Around 700 BC, the Bronze Age people we call the Villanovans began to be influenced by the Greeks and Phoenicianswho were sailing around the Mediterranean. They began to do things the way the Greeks and the Phoenicians did them. Historians call these people the Etruscans (ee-TRUSS-kins). People used to think that the Etruscans came from someplace in West Asia, because the Greek historian Herodotus tells a story about some people from West Asia, the Lydians, who might have been the Etruscans. He says that...