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Concept
History of the Alps
Summary
The valleys of the Alps have been inhabited since prehistoric times. The Alpine culture, which developed there, centers on transhumance.
Currently the Alps are divided among eight countries: France, Monaco, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany and Slovenia. In 1991 the Alpine Convention was established to regulate this transnational area, whose area measures about .
The Wildkirchli caves in the Appenzell Alps show traces of Neanderthal habitation (about 40,000 BCE). During the Würm glaciation (up to c. 11700 BP), the entire Alps were covered in ice.
Anatomically modern humans reach the Alpine region by c. 30,000 years ago. MtDNA Haplogroup K (believed to have originated in the mid-Upper Paleolithic, between about 30,000 and 22,000 years ago, with an estimated age here of c. 12,000 years BP), is a genetic marker associated with southeastern Alpine region.
Traces of transhumance appear in the neolithic. In the Bronze Age, the Alps formed the boundary of the Urnfield and Terramare cultures.
The mummy found on the Ötztal Alps, known as "Ötzi the Iceman", lived c. 3200 BC. At that stage the population in its majority had already changed from an economy based on hunting and gathering to one based on agriculture and animal husbandry. It is still an open question whether forms of pastoral mobility, such as transhumance (alpiculture), already existed in prehistory.
The earliest historical accounts date to the Roman period, mostly due to Greco-Roman ethnography, with some epigraphic evidence due to the Raetians, Lepontii and Gauls, with Ligurians and Venetii occupying the fringes in the southwest and southeast, respectively (Cisalpine Gaul) during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC.
The Rock Drawings in Valcamonica date to this period. A few details have come down to modern scholars of the conquest of many of the Alpine tribes by Augustus, as well as Hannibal's battles across the Alps.
Most of the local Gallic tribes allied themselves with the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War, for the duration of which Rome lost control over most of Northern Italy.
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