The history of Europe can be traced back to the appearance of the first modern humans identified as ancestors of contemporary Europeans about 37,000 years ago during the Paleolithic. Early European Farmers migrating from Anatolia spread agriculture across the continent during the Neolithic (7000–2000 BC), a period that also included early metallurgy. Starting around 4000 BC, westward migrations of steppe pastoralists spread Indo-European languages. The rise of the city-states of ancient Greece defines the beginning of classical antiquity (c. 800 BC-AD 500). The Hellenistic period (323–30 BC) began with the death of Alexander the Great and ended with the Roman Empire's control of the entire Mediterranean basin. Christianity emerged under Roman rule in the 1st century AD. The Migration Period of the Germanic peoples began in the late 4th century AD.

The abdication of the last Western Roman Emperor in 476 traditionally marks the beginning of the Middle Ages (c. 500–1500). While the Eastern Roman ("Byzantine") Empire with its capital in Constantinople continued for another 1000 years, the former lands of the Western Empire fragmented into the barbarian kingdoms. Beginning in the 7th century the Mediterranean became a battleground between the Byzantines and Muslims. The 8th-century Umayyad conquest of Hispania established Al-Andalus. The Rome-based Latin Church proclaimed the King of the Franks, Charlemagne, as "Emperor of the Romans" in the early 9th century and increasingly competitive missionary efforts by the Latin West and Byzantines resulted in the division of the Slavic peoples between Latin and Cyrillic use. Norsemen raided, invaded, and trafficked slaves across Europe during the Viking Age. During the High Middle Ages (c. 1000–1300), the Latin Church split with the Eastern Orthodox Church, was convulsed by reform and entangled in conflict with secular monarchs, called for the Crusades, and provided key support for northern Italian city-states achieving independence from the Holy Roman Empire. The oldest university currently in continuous operation in the world was established in the 12th century amid rapid population and urban growth that continued until the end of the 13th century. Despite a decline in population caused by the Great Famine and the Black Death in the 14th century, Europe experienced a cultural Renaissance in the 15th century.

Early modern Europe began with 15th-century revolutions in both printing and seafaring. Printing changed how knowledge was created, preserved and disseminated while the Age of Discovery led to extensive colonization, the Atlantic slave trade and the Columbian exchange. The 16th-century Reformation challenged the hegemony of the Catholic Church and precipitated over a century of religious wars. With leadership from Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei and English mathematical physicist Isaac Newton, modern science emerged during the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century.

The Industrial Revolution and waves of liberal and nationalist upheaval shaped the long 19th century dominated by the five great powers of the Concert of Europe. Two rival military alliances fought World War I (1914–1918), which ended with multi-ethnic empires fragmented into nation states. Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland launched World War II (1939–1945), and as its armies overran Europe the regime systematically perpetrated the Holocaust. During the Cold War (1947–1991), Europe was divided between a U.S.-led Western bloc of countries and the NATO military alliance and the Soviet-led Eastern bloc and the Warsaw Pact. The Western bloc's colonial empires and remaining military dictatorships in Portugal, Greece and Spain were dismantled. After Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev refused to intervene militarily against democratic reforms in Poland and elsewhere, the Revolutions of 1989 led to all European communist states transitioning to market economies and then the Soviet Union itself dissolving. The European Union ("EU") was established in 1993. In the 21st century, most of the former communist states joined the EU and Europe faced the Euro area crisis (2009–2018) and the Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022–).

Prehistoric Europe

Prehistoric Europe refers to the earliest era of human life in Europe predating any written records.

Paleolithic and Mesolithic

The Paleolithic ("Old Stone Age") and Mesolithic ("Middle of Stone Age") eras in Europe were defined by a hunter-gatherer way of life and increasingly specialized stone tools. Kostenki 14, who lived in the Don River basin around 37,000 years ago, is among the earliest Europeans whose genome carries an ancestry signature recognizable in contemporary populations of the continent. The Last Glacial Maximum, roughly 27,000 to 19,000 years ago, pushed populations into southern refugia and may have reduced the human population of Europe to as few as 20,000 people. The Western Hunter-Gatherers, who would later dominate the continent and form one of the three distinct ancestral components of modern Europeans, probably later expanded from southeastern Europe. By the late Mesolithic, the coastal foraging Ertebølle of southern Scandinavia (c. 5,400–3,950 BC) were one of the most complex hunter-gatherer cultures in Europe.

Neolithic and Copper Age

Neolithic Europe emerged in the 7th millennium BC as the first permanent settlements – with houses, wells, granaries, and defensive structures – appeared in the Balkans. These settlements are linked to Early European Farmers migrating from Anatolia, the second main ancestral component (after the earlier Mesolithic Western hunter-gatherers) of contemporary Europeans. Three Balkan archaeological sites hold, respectively, the world's oldest securely dated evidence of high-temperature copper smelting (c. 5000 BC), the world's oldest gold artifacts (c. 4600 BC), and Europe's oldest urban center (c. 4700–4200 BC). Yamnaya pastoralists began expanding into Southeast Europe around 4200 BC but the main Indo-European migration came c. 3300–2600 BC, after which Indo-European languages spread across the continent.

Protohistoric Europe

Bronze Age

The first well-known literate civilization in Europe was the Minoan civilization that arose on the island of Crete and flourished from approximately the 27th century BC to the 15th century BC.

The Minoans were replaced by the Mycenaean civilization which flourished during the period roughly between 1600 BC, when Helladic culture in mainland Greece was transformed under influences from Minoan Crete, and 1100 BC. The major Mycenaean cities were Mycenae and Tiryns in Argolis, Pylos in Messenia, Athens in Attica, Thebes and Orchomenus in Boeotia, and Iolkos in Thessaly. In Crete, the Mycenaeans occupied Knossos. Mycenaean settlement sites also appeared in Epirus, Macedonia, on islands in the Aegean Sea, on the coast of Asia Minor, the Levant,The Synchronisation of Civilisations in the eastern Mediterranean in the Second Millennium BC III, Proceedings of the SCIEM 2000 – 2nd EuroConference, Vienna, 28 May – 1 June 2003 CyprusUse and appreciation of Mycenaean pottery in the Levant, Cyprus and Italy , Gert Jan van Wijngaarden, Amsterdam Archaeological Studies and Italy.The Mycenaeans and Italy: the archaeological and archaeometric ceramic evidence, University of Glasgow, Department of ArchaeologyEmilio Peruzzi, Mycenaeans in early Latium, (Incunabula Graeca 75), Edizioni dell'Ateneo & Bizzarri, Roma, 1980 Mycenaean artefacts have been found well outside the limits of the Mycenaean world.

Quite unlike the Minoans, whose society benefited from trade, the Mycenaeans advanced through conquest. Mycenaean civilization was dominated by a warrior aristocracy. Around 1400 BC, the Mycenaeans extended their control to Crete, the centre of the Minoan civilization. The Mycenaean civilization perished with the collapse of Bronze-Age civilization on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. The collapse has been variously attributed to Dorian invasion, natural disasters and/or climate change. Whatever the causes, the Mycenaean civilization had disappeared after LH III C, when the sites of Mycenae and Tiryns were again destroyed. This end, during the last years of the 12th century BC, occurred after a slow decline of the Mycenaean civilization, which lasted many years before dying out. The beginning of the 11th century BC opened a new context, that of the protogeometric, the beginning of the geometric period, the Greek Dark Ages of traditional historiography.

The Bronze Age collapse may be seen in the context of technological history that saw the slow spread of ironworking technology from present-day Bulgaria and Romania in the 13th and the 12th centuries BC.See A. Stoia and the other essays in M.L. Stig Sørensen and R. Thomas, eds., The Bronze Age: Iron Age Transition in Europe (Oxford) 1989, and T.A. Wertime and J.D. Muhly, The Coming of the Age of Iron (New Haven) 1980.

The Tumulus culture and the following Urnfield culture of central Europe were part of the origin of the Roman and Greek cultures.

Iron Age

Classical antiquity

Classical antiquity, also known as the classical era, classical period, classical age, or simply antiquity, is the period between the 8th century BC and the 5th century AD during which the interwoven civilizations of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, known together as the Greco-Roman world and centered on the Mediterranean Basin, flourished and influenced Europe, North Africa, and West Asia.

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece (also "Hellenic civilisation") was a group of several hundred relatively independent but culturally and linguistically related city-states ("poleis") – including Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, and Syracuse – distinguished by remarkable accomplishments in architecture, philosophy, mathematics, sports, theatre and music. Athens governed itself with a form of direct democracy and by the late 4th century BC as many as half of the over one thousand existing Greek cities might have been democracies.Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015) Princeton University Press. Athens was the home of Socrates (c. 470-399 BC), Plato (c. 428–347 BC), the Platonic Academy, Aristotle (384–322 BC) and the Peripatetic school. Hellenic city-states established colonies on the shores of the Black Sea (Greek Crimea and Pontic Greeks) and Mediterranean (Anatolia, Sicily, and southern Italy) and also fought a half century of wars with the Persian Empire.

Hellenic infighting left Greek city states vulnerable, and Philip II of Macedon (r. 359–336 BC) united the Greek city states under his control. His son, Alexander the Great (r. 336–323 BC), conquered Egypt and Persia and going as far off as India. During the Hellenistic period (323–30 BC) following the death of Alexander and the wars between his generals, the resulting Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Macedonian kingdoms spread Greek culture to regions as far away as Bactria. In the newly founded city of Alexandria, Euclid's (fl. 300 BC) Elements revolutionized geometry and has been referred to as the most successful textbook ever written * and second only to the Bible in the number of editions that have been published. The Syracusan mathematician, physicist, astronomer, engineer and inventor Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BC) is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time as well as the father of mathematical physics.

Ancient Rome