"The remains of the oldest known western European have been discovered in a cave in Spain, pushing back the beginnings of human occupation in the continent by up to 400,000 years." Read more
Bear in mind that they're talking about the geographical area of "Western Europe," not the ethnic/cultural/genetic population known today as "Western Europeans." The Homo antecessor species discussed in this article may or may not have spread across Europe, but regardless of that it was completely supplanted by Homo neanderthalensis about a million years later. Then Homo sapiens came and replaced the Neanderthals roughly 25,000 years ago. There have been several waves of migration of the modern human species from Asia into Europe. We only have tantalizing traces of the people who lived there before the Indo-European tribes started colonizing the continent five or six thousand years ago, such as Stonehenge and the single surviving remnant of the people themselves: the Basques. The Balts and Slavs whom we generally identify as "the Eastern Europeans" are relative newcomers. They were close relatives of the Indo-Iranian people (judging by their language) who had settled around the Ukraine and then migrated into their modern homelands in the early centuries CE. The ancestors of the Finns, Estonians and Sami ("Lapps"), on the other hand, may go back thousands of years earlier, all the way to the Stone Age. They may join the Basques as the oldest surviving European tribes. (AFAIK nobody knows how long the Basques have been there.) The Huns and the Magyars--who were probably Mongolic tribes--arrived in the 2nd to 4th centuries CE. The Bulgars came around the same time; they are also probably a Mongolic tribe even though they adopted the Slavonic tongue of their new neighbors and their modern descendants are thought of as Slavs. During the second millennium CE, substantial numbers of Jews fled the increasing hostility of Catholic Western Europe for more tolerant Orthodox Eastern Europe. The Turks arrived about a thousand years ago. They seem to be the descendants of a band of Mongols who intermarried with every ethnic/national group they encountered or conquered on their journey, during which they also adopted Islam. The Finnic languages, the Turkic languages, the lost language of the Bulgars, and Hungarian are commonly hypothesized as members of a "Mongolic" language superfamily which also includes Mongolian and perhaps even Manchurian, Korean and Japanese. Linguistics as a science seems doomed to have no hard evidence to support its theories prior to the invention of writing, so we may never be certain about these relationships. However, DNA provides hard evidence for determining the relationships between people, regardless of which languages they now speak. A lot of DNA analysis is currently being performed and new studies are released more than once a year. We will certainly know more about the origins and migrations of the people of Eastern Europe very soon. For now, most anthropologists are content with a chronology of the existing European peoples in which the Basques and Finnic peoples were there first; then the Indo-European tribes arrived in Europe in approximately this order: Celts, Greeks, Teutons, Romans, Albanians, with the Slavs coming last; and the Huns, Magyars, Bulgars, Jews and Turks as latecomers.
