A spear of hardened yew, presumably flung or thrust by a human, fixes itself between the ribs of an elephant in what is now Saxony

Neanderthals carve a flute from the leg bone of a young bear, in the region that is now Slovenia

Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers use mammoth tusks and bones to support hide-covered tents at Dolni Vestonice (in the Czech Republic)

Rhinoceroses, lions and mammoth feature on the walls of the Chauvet cave, in southern France

A Stone Age sculptor shapes a timeless image of female fecundity in the famous Willendorf Venus

The neolithic town of Khirokitia in Cyprus has a paved public street with lanes leading off to courtyards of round tent-like houses

A passage grave with a superb corbelled dome is constructed on the Île Longue off the southern coast of Brittany

In Mesopotamia, and on the grass steppes of southern Russia, oxen are used to pull heavy loads on sledges

Olives are cultivated in Crete and will provide, in the form of olive oil, one of the main staples of Mediterranean trade

A neolithic herdsman dies high in the Alps - and is perfectly preserved in ice

The sculptors of the Cyclades produce stylized and formal figures, mainly female, in white marble

A small neolithic community builds a village at Skara Brae in the Orkneys, of stone houses with built-in stone furniture

A superb passage grave is built at Newgrange in Ireland

At Stonehenge, constructed and altered over many centuries, the largest stones are put in place

A ring of large standing stones is raised in England at Avebury, now a village in Wiltshire

Knossos, and other such palaces, are built for dynasties in Minoan Crete

The cemetery at Los Millares in Spain contains more than 100 beehive tombs

The Beaker people arrive in Britain, bringing several desirable commodities - including horses, alcohol and bronze

A bull-fighting fresco in the palace of Knossos is linked with the island's cult of the bull

The eruption of a volcano, on the island of Thera, entombs and preserves houses with frescoes in the Minoan city of Akrotiri

The Slavs settle in the regions of eastern Europe and western Russia

Indo-European tribes, speaking Baltic languages, settle in the regions of modern Lithuania and Latvia

Texts written at Mycenae, in the script known as Linear B, are the earliest surviving version of Greek

The massive architecture of Mycenaean cities such as Tiryns is said in Greek legend to have been built by one-eyed giants, the Cyclopes

The so-called Treasury of Atreus, at Mycenae, is the most spectacular of the beehive tombs of this period