The whole course of later prehistory in Europe is, in fact, so very complicated that there is no single good book to cover it all; certainly there is none in English. There are some good regional accounts and some good general accounts of part of the range from about 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1. I suspect that the difficulty of making a good book that covers all of its later prehistory is another aspect of what makes Europe so very complicated a continent today. The prehistoric foundations for Europe’s very complicated set of civilizations, cultures, and sub-cultures--which begin to appear as history proceeds--were in themselves very complicated. Hence, I selected the case of Britain as a single example of how prehistory ends in Europe. It could have been more complicated than we found it to be. Even in the subject matter on Britain in the chapter before the last, we did not see direct traces of the effect on Britain of the very important developments which took place in the Danubian way from the Near East. Apparently Britain was not affected. Britain received the impulses which brought copper, bronze, and iron tools from an original east Mediterranean homeland into Europe, almost at the ends of their journeys. But by the same token, they had had time en route to take on their characteristic European aspects. Some time ago, Sir Cyril Fox wrote a famous book called _The Personality of Britain_, sub-titled “Its Influence on Inhabitant and Invader in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times.” We have not gone into the post-Roman early historic period here; there are still the Anglo-Saxons and Normans to account for as well as the effects of the Romans. But what I have tried to do was to begin the story of how the personality of Britain was formed. The principles that Fox used, in trying to balance cultural and environmental factors and interrelationships would not be greatly different for other lands. Summary [Illustration] In the pages you have read so far, you have been brought through the earliest 99 per cent of the story of man’s life on this planet. I have left only 1 per cent of the story for the historians to tell. THE DRAMA OF THE PAST Men first became men when evolution had carried them to a certain point. This was the point where the eye-hand-brain co-ordination was good enough so that tools could be made. When tools began to be made according to sets of lasting habits, we know that men had appeared. This happened over a half million years ago. The stage for the play may have been as broad as all of Europe, Africa, and Asia. At least, it seems unlikely that it was only one little region that saw the beginning of the drama.