Chalcolithic Europe

Meanwhile, the Danubian Lengyel culture absorbed its northern neighbours of the Czech Republic and Poland over a number of centuries, only to recede in the second half of the period.

In Bulgaria and Wallachia (Southern Romania), the Boian-Marica culture evolved into a monarchy with a clearly royal cemetery near the coast of the Black Sea.

Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean basin, several cultures (most notably Chassey in SE France and La Lagozza in northern Italy) converged into a functional union, of which the most significant characteristic was the distribution network of honey-coloured flint.

The rest of the Balkans was profoundly restructured after the invasions of the previous period but, with the exception of the Coțofeni culture in a mountainous region, none of them show any eastern (or presumably Indo-European) traits.

In the East, the peoples of beyond the Volga (Yamnaya culture), surely eastern Indo-Europeans, ancestors of Iranians, took over southern Russia and Ukraine.

But the Mediterranean and Danubian groupings of the previous period appear to have been fragmented into many smaller pieces, some of them apparently backward in technological matters.

In the southwestern Iberian peninsula, owl-like plaques made of sandstone were discovered and dated to be crafted from 5500 to 4750 BP (Before Present).

[7] Around 2400 BC this people of the Corded Ware replaced their predecessors and expanded to Danubian and Nordic areas of western Germany.

Nevertheless, out of their original area of western Central Europe, they appeared only inside local cultures, so they never invaded and assimilated but rather went to live among those peoples, keeping their way of life.

From c. 2300 BC the first Beaker Pottery appeared in Bohemia and expanded in many directions, but particularly westward, along the Rhone and the sea shores, reaching the culture of Vila Nova (Portugal) and Catalonia (Spain) as its limit.

The second phase of Beaker Pottery, from c. 2100 BC onwards, was marked by the displacement of the centre of this phenomenon to Portugal, inside the culture of Vila Nova.