Who moved into, across and out of Europe, from the first modern humans among the Neanderthals to farmers, steppe herders, Slavs, Vikings, Roma, religious refugees, Atlantic emigrants, the deported and the displaced, and the people on the move today.
Stop 01 · c. 47,000–40,000 years ago
Newcomers in a Neanderthal Land
Europe already had people when ours arrived. Neanderthals were living here when small groups of modern humans came in from the south-east. At Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria, bones of our species are directly dated to about 45,000 years ago. Others reached Ranis in Germany and Zlatý kůň in Czechia around the same time. The two kinds of human shared the continent for somewhere between 2,600 and 5,400 years, and the last Neanderthal tools vanish about 40,000 years ago, at different times in different places. Their meeting left a mark: people outside Africa today carry about 2 to 3 per cent Neanderthal DNA. Yet the Ranis group seems to have left no descendants at all. Arriving first did not mean lasting.
Europe already had people when ours arrived. Neanderthals were living here when small groups of modern humans came in from the south-east. At Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria, bones of our species are directly dated to about 45,000 years ago. Others reached Ranis in Germany and Zlatý kůň in Czechia around the same time. The two kinds of human shared the continent for somewhere between 2,600 and 5,400 years, and the last Neanderthal tools vanish about 40,000 years ago, at different times in different places. Their meeting left a mark: people outside Africa today carry about 2 to 3 per cent Neanderthal DNA. Yet the Ranis group seems to have left no descendants at all. Arriving first did not mean lasting.
Then the cold closed in. Between 25,000 and 19,000 years ago the last Ice Age reached its worst. A study of 356 ancient hunter-gatherer genomes shows what happened next. Western groups held on in the milder south-west, in today's France and Iberia, and their descendants include the Magdalenian people of the age of Lascaux. Italy had long been thought a second refuge, but the researchers found no evidence for it: people with a new gene pool settled there instead. About 14,000 years ago those newcomers, who probably came from the Balkans, spread across the rest of Europe and replaced the Magdalenians. Long before farms or cities, Europe's people had already changed more than once.
About 8,500 years ago, a new way of life crossed into Europe from what is now Turkey. Scholars once argued over whether farming travelled as an idea or with people, and ancient DNA has largely answered: people came too. Farming towns such as Çatalhöyük had been flourishing in Anatolia for centuries. Early farmers across Europe trace back to the Aegean, through northern Greece and north-west Turkey. One stream followed the Balkans into central Europe by about 7,500 years ago. Another went along the Mediterranean to Iberia and on up the Atlantic, reaching Britain about 6,000 years ago. West of a line from the Black Sea to the Baltic, hunter-gatherers were in many areas almost entirely replaced.
Around 3300 BCE a new culture appeared on the grasslands north of the Black Sea: the Yamnaya, a people formed from earlier mixing on the steppe. Within about a thousand years their descendants had reached most of Europe, the second great turnover of its population. In Britain, people using Beaker pottery brought steppe ancestry and replaced about 90 per cent of the gene pool within a few hundred years. Most scholars link this spread to the Indo-European family, which runs from English to Hindi. One 2023 study argues instead for roots south of the Caucasus some 8,100 years ago, while other linguists answer that shared words for wheels and yokes point to a later date. What the DNA shows clearly is mixing: most Europeans descend from hunters, farmers and herders together.
Now the sea carried settlers too. Phoenicians from the coast of today's Lebanon founded colonies on Cyprus, Sardinia, Sicily and Malta, in North Africa and in Iberia. Carthage, by tradition dated to 814 BCE, became a power of its own. Greeks followed from about the 8th century, pushed by crowding, trade and unrest at home. Settlers from Phocaea founded Massalia, today's Marseille, and ancient writers counted 70 to 90 colonies around the Black Sea alone. In Plato, Socrates pictures his people around the sea like ants or frogs at a pond. On land, Celtic-speaking groups were moving as well. Gauls sacked Rome around 387 BCE and invaded the Balkans in 279, and some crossed into Anatolia. Where Celtic languages began is still argued over.
Rome kept people moving. Soldiers, traders and the enslaved crossed the empire in every direction. At South Shields, at the end of Hadrian's frontier, the fort was held in turn by units raised in Pannonia, Spain and Gaul, and finally by bargemen from the Tigris. The emperor Septimius Severus was born in Libya and died in York in 211. A year later Caracalla made nearly every free man in the empire a citizen. Rome itself passed a million residents, and its people carried ancestry from across the Near East, Europe and North Africa. Ancient DNA suggests the city took in net immigration from the Near East in imperial times, and then a growing share from Europe.
In 376 Goths fleeing the Huns crossed the Danube into Roman land. Over the next two centuries Vandals, Franks, Lombards, Angles and Saxons followed, and the western empire ended. These journeys have a tour of their own on this site. The question here is how many people moved, and scholars disagree. Some see whole peoples on the road. Others see armed groups and their families, numbering in the tens of thousands, taking over from a failing state. Estimates for everyone who entered Roman land run from about half a million to over a million. DNA can now help. Early medieval people in eastern England drew up to 76 per cent of their ancestry from across the North Sea.
Not every great movement came with famous names. For generations scholars could not agree whether Slavic culture spread by migration, by assimilation or by both. In 2025 a Nature study of 555 ancient people reported large-scale movement in the 6th to 8th centuries from a region spanning southern Belarus and northern Ukraine. In eastern Germany it replaced more than 80 per cent of the gene pool, though the pattern varied by region. Others came from much further away. Avars reached eastern Europe around 567, and in the 670s the Bulgars, Turkic steppe warriors, crossed the lower Danube. In 681 Byzantium recognised their state. Over time they merged with the Slavs and took up Slavic speech.
In 711 Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed from North Africa with an army of mostly Berbers, and a larger, mainly Arab force followed the next year. Within about seven years most of the Visigothic kingdom was under Muslim rule, with its capital at Córdoba. Berbers were often given the rugged uplands and Arabs the gentler south. Skeletons from the Muslim era show growing North African ancestry, and traces can be found in people across Spain today. In time the direction reversed. Granada, the last Muslim state, surrendered on 2 January 1492. Muslims who stayed were forced to convert, and from 1609 to 1614 Spain expelled their descendants, the Moriscos. Older estimates say about 300,000 left; recent work suggests many avoided expulsion.
Two more peoples came as raiders and stayed as neighbours. Danish warriors settled in eastern England, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records them beginning to plough and feed themselves in 876. By tradition, in 911 the leader Rollo received land around the lower Seine, the start of Normandy. Others sailed to Iceland from about 874, and ancient DNA shows those settlers were Norse, Gaelic or a mixture of both, many of the Gaelic arrivals probably coming as slaves. Far to the east, in about 895, the Magyars crossed the Carpathians and made the plain their home. Their language, grouped with Khanty and Mansi in western Siberia, still marks that journey. The Vikings and the Magyars each have a tour of their own here.
From the mid-12th century, farmers and townspeople moved east of the Elbe, in what is known by the German word Ostsiedlung, the settling of the east. Most came from the Holy Roman Empire, with many Dutch and Flemish among them. Local princes and lords invited them, and agents called locators led the parties and shared out the land. King Géza II of Hungary brought settlers to Transylvania, mainly from around Luxembourg and the Moselle, and their descendants are still called Saxons. New villages and planned towns spread heavy ploughs and German town law. Assimilation ran both ways, and the movement faded in the 14th century. Later nationalists, the Nazis among them, used this history to support their claims to territory.
Europe's largest minority began a long way from Europe. Genetic work traces the Roma to north-western India about 1,500 years ago, with a spread through the Balkans about 900 years ago. Their language, an Indo-Aryan tongue akin to Hindi and Punjabi, tells the same story. By 1418 they had reached Hamburg, and by 1427 Paris. People guessed they came from Egypt, which is where the word 'Gypsy' comes from. Welcome rarely lasted. England ordered them out in 1530. In Wallachia and Moldavia they were held in slavery, first recorded in 1385 and not ended in full until 1856, when some 250,000 people were freed. Around 10 million Roma live in Europe now.
Jewish communities had lived in Europe since Roman times, and in the Middle Ages they were pushed east again and again. In 1096 crusading mobs massacred Jews in Speyer, Worms and Mainz. England expelled its small community in 1290. Many refugees from the German lands moved on to Poland, where a 1264 statute offered legal protection, and by the mid-1500s, some sources say, about three-quarters of the world's Jews lived there. On 31 March 1492 Isabella and Ferdinand ordered Spain's Jews to leave by 31 July. Historians disagree on the numbers, which were perhaps as low as 40,000 and probably under 100,000. Many went to Portugal, North Africa, Italy and the Ottoman Empire, and in Salonika Jews soon formed a majority.
From a foothold at Gallipoli in about 1354 the Ottomans spread across south-eastern Europe, and they moved people as an act of government. The state shifted Turkmen and Tatar groups from Asia into the Balkans, and after 1453 Mehmed II brought Christians, Muslims and Jews to fill his new capital. Under the devshirme, boys from Christian families were taken away, raised as Muslims and trained for the army and the state. Islam spread among Albanians, Bosniaks and others, though the region stayed largely Christian for centuries. In about 1690, after a Habsburg retreat, Patriarch Arsenije III led many Serbs north into Hungary. Serbian and Albanian historians still dispute that exodus, and estimates run from a few thousand to several hundred thousand.
Rulers now competed for people. In October 1685 Louis XIV made Protestantism illegal in France and banned emigration, and Huguenots left anyway. Estimates of their number run from 200,000 to a million. They went to England, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Prussia, and some as far as the Cape. Within days Frederick William of Brandenburg offered them tax breaks, and about 20,000 came to his war-damaged lands. Nearly eighty years on, Catherine the Great published manifestos in 1762 and 1763 inviting foreigners to farm Russia's land. German colonists settled on the Volga, promised their language, their churches and freedom from military service. Some of those rights were later taken away. Their descendants return further along this tour, under Stalin.
Between 1850 and 1914, about 55 million Europeans crossed the oceans to the Americas and Australia. Ireland showed how desperate leaving could be. From 1845 potato blight ruined the crop on which the poor depended. About a million people died and over a million left, mainly for Britain and North America. Around nine million Italians left for good between 1860 and 1914, most of them for North or South America. In the Russian Empire, Jews faced poverty, legal restrictions and pogroms from 1881. More than 2.5 million Jews left eastern Europe by 1914, some two million of them for the United States. Over 12 million immigrants of many nations came through Ellis Island in New York between 1892 and 1924.
Empires had mixed people for centuries, and new nation states set about sorting them. After the Greek-Turkish war, the two governments signed a convention at Lausanne on 30 January 1923 that made an exchange of populations compulsory and defined people by religion, not language. About 1.2 million Orthodox Christians in all left Anatolia and Eastern Thrace, most having already fled, and some 355,000 to 400,000 Muslims left Greece. Turkish-speaking Christians and Greek-speaking Muslims were moved to countries whose language they might not know. Greece, with just over five million people, had to house them all, and by 1928 refugees were about a fifth of its population. The Muslims of Western Thrace and the Greeks of Istanbul, Imbros and Tenedos were exempted.
Some of the journeys in this story ended in murder planned by a state. Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators killed six million Jews, nearly two of every three in Europe. Many tried to leave first. By June 1939, 309,000 German, Austrian and Czech Jews had applied for 27,000 American places. From 1941 the regime organised mass killing: shootings in eastern Europe, and deportations from across the continent to killing centres in occupied Poland. At Auschwitz about 1.1 million people were murdered, about one million of them Jews. Germans and their allies also killed at least 250,000 Roma, and some scholars say around 500,000. Romania's regime and Croatia's Ustaša were among the perpetrators of that genocide.
The war tore millions more from their homes. By 1944 Nazi Germany was using some 10 million foreign forced labourers. Stalin deported whole peoples, including about 440,000 Volga Germans in 1941 and at least 191,000 Crimean Tatars in May 1944. After the war the frontiers themselves moved. At Potsdam the Allies accepted transfers of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, to be 'orderly and humane'. Between 12 and 16.5 million Germans fled or were expelled, depending on who is counted. Estimates of the dead run from about 500,000 to over two million. Over a million Poles were moved west, and in 1947 Poland's communist rulers scattered about 140,000 Ukrainians and Lemkos. Even the words are still argued over: German groups say expulsion, while Czech and Polish usage has often preferred milder terms such as transfer.
As empires ended, many people moved to the old imperial centres. On 22 June 1948 the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury with 1,027 passengers, about 800 of whom gave a Caribbean country as their last home. Some 250,000 to 300,000 people of Dutch origin left the former Dutch East Indies, most for the Netherlands. About 800,000 French settlers left Algeria around 1962, along with some 90,000 harkis and their families. Portugal received at least half a million people after 1974. Meanwhile West Germany needed labour, and signed agreements with Italy in 1955, Turkey in 1961 and others. About 14 million workers came before recruitment stopped in 1973. Most went home; others stayed, and their families joined them.
As Yugoslavia broke apart, its wars displaced about four million people. In Bosnia, from 1992 to 1995, over 2.2 million were displaced as Bosnian Serb forces took most of the country in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosniaks and Croats. In July 1995 Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica, a crime international courts have ruled was genocide. That August, when the Croatian army retook the Krajina, 150,000 to 200,000 Serbs fled. In 1999 Yugoslav and Serb forces expelled some 850,000 Kosovo Albanians from Kosovo. After that war ended, around 200,000 Serbs, Roma and other non-Albanians fled Kosovo in their turn.
Free movement has been at the heart of the European project since the European Economic Community was founded in 1957. In 1985 five countries agreed to remove the borders between them, and the Maastricht Treaty created EU citizenship in 1993. When the Iron Curtain fell, a new map of possible journeys opened. In May 2004 Poland and other central and eastern European countries joined the EU, and many people moved west. Polish-born residents of England and Wales rose from 58,000 in 2001 to 579,000 in 2011. On 1 January 2025, about 14.1 million people living in an EU country were citizens of another EU country. The largest groups were Romanians, Italians and Poles. Another 30.6 million were citizens of countries outside the EU.
In 2015 more than a million people reached Europe by sea, according to the UN refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration. Over 800,000 of them crossed the Aegean from Turkey into Greece, and about 150,000 went from North Africa to Italy. About half were Syrians leaving their country's war, with Afghans making up 20 per cent and Iraqis seven. At least 3,600 people died or went missing on the way. Many moved on through the Balkans towards northern Europe. That year EU countries recorded 1,255,600 first-time asylum applicants, more than double the year before. Germany registered the most, at 441,800, followed by Hungary and Sweden.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 sent millions west. On 4 March the EU triggered its temporary protection rules for the first time. In February 2026 the UN refugee agency counted 5.9 million Ukrainians still refugees abroad and 3.7 million displaced inside Ukraine. At the end of August 2026 about 4.43 million people held temporary protection in the EU, most of them in Germany, Poland and Czechia. Most are women and children. They join a very long story. Hunters, farmers, herders, sailors, the exiled and the hopeful: everyone on this map came from somewhere. Somewhere tonight a family is unpacking in a new town, and the story goes on.