At the time in which in Greece the Mycenaean civilization arose and flourished, various Indo-European-speaking groups spread from Central Europe to the south and the west. About the exact circumstances of these migrations, or of their size in population terms, we know practically nothing. For later history, however, they are important in as much as the newcomers in the long run succeeded in imposing their languages, with very few exceptions, on the existing pre-Indo-European populations. As a result, nearly the whole of Europe became a region of Indo-European languages. In Italy, we speak of the Italic peoples who settled there in the course of the 2nd millennium BC and who would become the ancestors of the Italic peoples known from historical sources in the 1st millennium BC, among whom would be the Romans.
The older Neolithic population groups in Central and Western Europe were already acquainted with simple forms of agriculture, and perhaps the Indo-European newcomers
Introduced improved techniques. Probably they brought a more intensive form of cattle breeding with them, and certainly they introduced the horse. With that, their arrival generally meant an improvement of material culture and presumably more complex or more hierarchical social organizations as well, although again very little is known in detail about this. In this connection also the technique of bronze working could spread further until around 1600 BC the whole of Europe, apart from Scandinavia and the northeast, were acquainted with this form of metallurgy, with which the Neolithic period finally came to an end.
World History
