The historical development of the Bulgarian lands and the people that inhabited them in the antiquity has been determined by one major factor - their crossroads situation between Europe and Asia. The waves of settlers that swept from both continents into the south or into the north at different times, quite often turned the plains of Thrace, Moesia, Macedonia and the Balkan mountains into an arena of fierce clashes.
Earth come, evolve and then, tragically go.
The earliest traces of human life on the Bulgarian lands date back to Paleolithic and Mesolithic times. The brilliant drawings in some Bulgarian caves and the flint labor tools are the only remnants of the primitive man, the homo sapiens forebearer. The emergence of horno sapiens in the lands of present-day Bulgaria seems to have taken place only about two thousand years after his initial appearance in the lands between Messopotamia and Palestine. As evident from the archeological excavations, copper production and, subsequently, that of bronze and precious metals were rather impressive for the scale of that remote epoch. These were concentrated in the Bulgarian lands rich in copper-containing ores.