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Who inhabited Italy in ancient times?
How long has Italy been inhabited by humans?
Where did ancient Italy come from?
What do we know about the native people of Italy?
This list of ancient peoples living in Italy summarises groupings of peoples existing in Italy before and during the Roman expansion and conquest of Italy. Many of the names are either scholarly inventions or exonyms assigned by the ancient writers of works in ancient Greek and Latin.
Italy attained a unified ethnolinguistic, political, and cultural physiognomy only after the Roman conquest, yet its most ancient peoples remain anchored in the names of the regions of Roman Italy— Latium, Campania, Apulia, Bruttium, Lucania, Samnium, Picenum, Umbria, Etruria, Venetia, and Liguria.
The European country of Italy has been inhabited by humans since at least 850,000 years ago. Since classical antiquity, ancient Etruscans, various Italic peoples (such as the Latins, Samnites, and Umbri), Celts, Magna Graecia colonists, and other ancient peoples have inhabited the Italian Peninsula.
The Italic peoples are descended from the Urnfield and Tumulus culture, Indo-European speaking peoples who inhabited Italy from at least the second millennium BC onwards. Latins achieved a dominant position among these tribes, establishing ancient Roman civilization.
Italy, in Roman antiquity, the Italian Peninsula from the Apennines in the north to the “boot” in the south. In 42 bc Cisalpine Gaul, north of the Apennines, was added; and in the late 3rd century ad Italy came to include the islands of Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia, as well as Raetia and part of.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Aside from a few inscriptions, most of what we know about the native people of Italy comes from Greek and Roman sources. Still, this information, combined with archaeological and linguistic information, gives us some idea about the peoples that once populated the Italian Peninsula.
Italy has been inhabited since the Paleolithic era. This is evidenced by the finds of stone tools and horns in the Romanelli grotto in the south of the peninsula, Neanderthal skulls in Latium, caves with paintings of the Ancient Stone Age in Liguria.
