Zuffenhausen area is traversed by a huge faultline, called the "Schwieberdinger-Zuffenhäuser-Cannstatter rejection", which was formed 65 million years ago by the tectonic activities that created the nearby Alps.

In Zuffenhausen it led to the fact that, due to its irregular course, greatly disturbed by collapses of quarries, Muschelkalk and Gipskeuper alternately surfaced at about the same height and further to the west near Neuwirtshaus even elements of ragstone and the Löwenstein Formation.

The ice ages of the Pleistocene era completed the recent physiography, composed largely of Loess, Brown and Black soils, the prerequisites for later agricultural use, that began during the Neolithic Revolution with the Linear Pottery culture.

However, especially in the Loess areas, the forests quickly faded by intensive use within decades and their composition also changed with Elm and Tilia disappearing almost completely.

[7] The modern course and the valley marshes of the Feuerbach exist since the Holocene, which created large deposits of fine material during high tides of up to 8 m (26 ft) as the one near the old village, nicknamed the Alte Flecken (German: old stain, or old spot).

In modern times, the entire water network is oriented on the Neckar, but the Feuerbach is still an important part of it featuring several tributaries of its own coming mostly from the west.

Since the 19th century, people have also considerably changed the geographical features of Zuffenhausen via the development of railway lines and roads, the excavated material was used to fill depressions and drain local ponds.

The landscape changed during the massive expansion of settlements beyond the Feuerbach valley, especially during the second half of the 19th century to the west and to the east, after 1945, with the introduction of Sealed roads and the rerouting of streams in unprecedented scale.

Miscellaneous changes to the landscape includes the filling in of a few old quarries and clay pits in the Feuerbach river valley, and the creation of a high plateau of an old ditch that came down from Stammheim, which now serves as an expansion of Zuffenhausen's cemetery.

Measures have been made to improve the situation faced by the landscape of Zuffenhausen, such as land restoration, the creation of wildlife corridors, and the establishment of green development plans.

Paleo-Humans, such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus have stalked the rich and abundant wildlife present for roughly 300,000 years, as evidenced by the discovery of early tools typically made of mammoth bones at Travertine quarries in nearby Cannstatt and Ludwigsburg.

On April 23, 1907, during the reign of King William II of Württemberg, Zuffenhausen became a city and would later be incorporated into Stuttgart on March 31, 1931, following financial difficulties symptomatic of the Great Depression.

Though many settlements from the Neolithic to the Iron Age have existed, Zuffenhausen entered the era of recorded history during the period of the Alemanni tribes.

Early Neolithic (Linear Pottery):[16] The primary discoveries dating back to this period include the remains of a settlement with its iconic banded ceramics in the northern and eastern areas of the district.

[17][18] Due to the existence of such types of soils it is implied that there used to be a warmer climate and open wooded steppes during the Holocene period that were suitable for clearing and could be found in valleys.

One of these graves contained one of the oldest examples of prepared food (legumes, toasted bread, hazelnuts and flaxseed), which was intended likely for provision in the afterlife journey and allow conclusions regarding their religious ideas which probably included ancestor worship.

They cultivated einkorn, emmer and wheat, but only after the cutting down and incineration of nearby mixed oak forests by early settlements in need of new lands for crops.

The largest of these sites, located in Rot, yielded many individual finds of flint tools (blades, scrapers, axes, Quern-stones) and even inkstones and ceramics.

The site of the old town center was an unsuitable location for the longhouses of the Linear Pottery culture (usually about 20 to 40 m (66 to 131 ft) long, typically held up to 60 persons and their cattle) as it was a swampy floodplain (the average temperatures of the climate were about 2 to 3 degrees higher than they are now), so they built their villages (typically a cluster of 10 or so buildings) at more elevated locations that still had a decent amount of loess.

[21] Middle Neolithic:[22] Starting at the end of the 6th Millennium BC, the decoration on the pottery changed, stone axes began to actually have holes for the handle instead of the usage of glue or a splice.

Outside the city, another nine burial mounds have been identified, that seem to suggest a relationship to the late Hallstatt settlements of South-Stammheim, where waste pits and a storage cellars were found.

Increasingly documented by written sources, a Roman provincial culture emerged in this Agri Decumates of Germania Superior with Mainz (then known as Mogontiacum) as the region's capital and seat of the governor.

Civilian estates (mostly Villa rustica), while being nowhere near as gigantic as the Castrum, were still numerous throughout the region and existed to supply the plebeian soldiers and patrician officers alike.

In Baden-Württemberg alone, at least a thousand such estates are known to exist and the majority thereof in the fertile Neckar river valley around Zuffenhausen, Bad Cannstatt, Ludwigsburg, and Heilbronn.

[21] The area of Zuffenhausen contains numerous of these cultural testimonies, such as several estates spread across the south and southeastern parts of the river valley that made intensive use of the soil (regardless of its fertility), as the need for food was enormous and required an extensive road network.

The cracks started showing in earnest when the Alemanni overran Agri Decumates in 260 and the wars of 353 to 378 AD (thus bringing Old High German into the region).

In the so-called "Expansion Phase" of the 7th century the Alemanni experienced the introduction of Christianity and a small explosion of population under strong Franconian-Merovingian influence.