Prehistoric Sweden
The runic script was developed in the second century, and the brief inscriptions that remain demonstrate that the people of south Scandinavia then spoke Proto-Norse, a language ancestral to modern Swedish.
Shortly before the close of the Younger Dryas (c. 9600 BC), the west coast of Sweden (Bohuslän) was visited by hunter-gatherers from northern Germany.
This cultural group is commonly referred to as the Ahrensburgian and were engaged in fishing and sealing along the coast of western Sweden during seasonal rounds from the Continent.
Around the country's capital, for instance, the earliest seal-hunter sites are now on inland mountain tops, and they grow progressively later as one moves downhill toward the sea.
[citation needed] Farming and animal husbandry, along with monumental burial, polished flint axes and decorated pottery, arrived from the Continent with the Funnel-beaker Culture in c. 4,000 BC.
The Neolithic Funnelbeaker farmers replaced the Ertebølle culture, which had maintained a Mesolithic lifestyle for about 1500 years after farming arrived in Central Europe.
Coastal south-eastern Sweden, likewise, reverted from neolithisation to a hunting and fishing economy after only a few centuries, with the Pitted Ware Culture.
[3] The Battle Axe and Pitted Ware people then coexisted as distinct archaeological entities until c. 2,400 BC, when they merged into a fairly homogeneous Late Neolithic culture.
In approximately 800 BC, the coastal area of Middle-Sweden was inhabited by people speaking early Finnic languages with close relations with Southwest Finland and northern Estonia.
The period's abundant rock carvings largely portray long rowing ships: these images appear to allude both to trade voyages and to mythological concepts.
[citation needed] Bronze Age religion as depicted in rock art centres upon the sun, nature, fertility and public ritual.
[citation needed] In the absence of any Roman occupation, Sweden's Iron Age is reckoned up to the introduction of stone architecture and monastic orders about 1,100 AD.
[citation needed] The climate took a turn for the worse, forcing farmers to keep cattle indoors over the winters, leading to an annual build-up of manure that could now for the first time be used systematically for soil improvement.
The reappearance of weapon burial after millennium's hiatus suggests a process of increased social stratification similar to the one at the beginning of the Bronze Age.
A Roman attempt to move the Imperial border forward from the Rhine to the Elbe was aborted in 9 AD when Germans under Roman-trained leadership defeated the legions of Varus by ambush in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.
[citation needed] Starting in the second century AD, much of southern Sweden's agricultural land was parcelled up with low stone walls.
Whether any of the brief information he reports about this distant barbaric area was well-founded is uncertain, but he does mention tribal names that appear to correspond with the Swedes and Sami of later centuries.
In recent decades, however, scholarship has gravitated to the view that the period was in fact one of prosperity and glorious elite culture, but that it ended with a severe crisis, possibly having to do with the 535‒536 AD atmospheric dust event and the concomitant famine.
