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See also: Neolithic and Bronze Age
People lived in what is today Denmark more than 100,000 years ago, but they were likely forced to leave for a time because of the ice cap that covered the land for some of the intervening time during the ice age. It is thought that people have lived continually in Denmark since around 12,000 BC. Agriculture made inroads around 3,000 BC. The Nordic Bronze Age period in Denmark was marked by a culture which buried its dead, with their worldly goods, beneath burial mounds. Many dolmens and rock tombs (especially "passage graves") date from this period. Among the many bronze finds from this period are beautiful religious artifacts and musical instruments, and the earliest evidence of social classes and stratification.
During the Iron Age ( 500 BC - 1 AD), the climate in Denmark and southern Scandinavia may have become cooler and wetter, limiting agriculture and setting the stage for native groups to migrate southward into Germania. At around this time, people began to extract iron from the ore in peat bogs. Evidence of Celtic immigration and culture dates from this period in Denmark and much of nortwest Europe, and is reflected in some of the older place names.
The Roman provinces, whose frontiers stopped well short of Denmark, nevertheless maintained trade routes and relations with Danish peoples, attested by finds of Roman coins. About AD 200 the first runic inscription appeared. Depletion of cultivated land in the last century BC seems to have contributed to increasing migrations in northern Europe and increasing conflict of Teutonic tribes with Roman settlements in Gaul. Roman artifacts are especially common in finds from the first century AD.
The material culture of northern Europe during the mass migrations of the 5th-7th centuries is referred to as the Germanic iron age. Among the most well-known remains from the period are the "peat bog corpses," which appear to be the well-preserved bodies of two men deliberately strangled, perhaps as community sacrifices. Incursions into Denmark from the north increased in the 5th century. One of the most widely dominant was a tribe called the Danes, who arrived from Sweden around 500 AD. The name of the tribe was applied by Germans to the south to the whole of the Denmark peninsula (in old German, Denmark means "border region inhabited by Danes").
People who became known as Vikings inhabited much of Denmark for the several hundred years from the 8th to the 11th century AD. They had a more complicated social structure than most previous societies to inhabit the areas and became famous for the raiding and trading throughout the rest of Europe.
During the Viking period, Denmark was a great power based on the Jutland Peninsula, the Island of ZealandThis article is about the Danish island. For the Dutch province, see Zeeland; for the Pacific island country named for the province, see New Zealand. Zealand (Danish: Sjaelland is the largest island of Denmark. It is separated from Funen by the Great Belt, and the southern part of what is now SwedenThe Kingdom of Sweden Konungariket Sverige in Swedish) is a Nordic country in Scandinavia, in Northern Europe. It is bordered by Norway on the west, Finland on the northeast, the Skagerrak and the Kattegat on the southwest, and the Baltic Sea and the Gulf. In the early 11th century, King Canute united Denmark and England for almost 30 years.
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