This study presents and analyses dancing activities
in prehistoric Europe. This subject covers such a vast
geographical area and large span of time, that we
must limit our discussion to a number of case studies
in order to demonstrate the types of evidence
that we have on this very elusive aspect of human
behaviour. Researching the dance of past societies is
usually limited to historical periods, and relies on
written sources or graphic representations of dancing.
The history of dance in the ancient world has
focused mainly on drawings on Greek pottery of the
mid-first millennium BC. Some attention has been
devoted to the description of dancing in Pharaonic
Egyptian (the second and third millennia BC). In my
previous work, I enlarged the historical perspective
of dance to include the Early Neolithic period in the
Near East, up to c. 9000 BC. Recently, however, it
can be shown that the history of dance can be started
as early as the first appearance of modern humans
in Europe, nearly 40 000 years ago.