Little is known of the earliest Stone Age inhabitants of Europe's southwestern extremity. The ancient Greeks called them the Cynetes (or Cunetes). Whatever their origins, their culture evolved under the pressure and influence of foreign forces. Among the many invading armies that settled here and contributed to nascent Portuguese culture were Phoenicians, who settled in the area around 1,000 b.c., followed by the Celts, Iberians, Greeks, and Carthaginians. But it was the Romans, who arrived late in the third century b.c., who most greatly influenced all of Iberia. They built towns, industries, roads, and bridges, developed agriculture, and bequeathed the Latin language, of which Portuguese is a direct descendant. The Romans named the southwestern province of the peninsula Lusitania, oddly enough for one of the Celtiberian tribes they defeated, and by the third century a.d. had introduced Christianity. By the beginning of the fourth century the Algarve had a bishop in place, based in Faro. But Rome had already fallen into decay, and soon hordes of northern tribesmen took over the empire. The Algarve fell to the Visigoths in the mid-fifth century. Under Moorish Rule In a.d. 711, the Moors brought powerful armies from North Africa and launched a devastating attack on the Iberian peninsula, conquering much of what would become Spain and Portugal. They imposed Islam and left an indelible influence on the countryside and the population of the Algarve. The Moorish legacy can still be seen in the form of wells and waterwheels, squat white houses, the dark complexions of the people, and in the very name given the regiontaken from Al-Gharb, which means "country of the west" (when the Moors conquered the territory, it was the most westerly in the known world). The Moors governed their Iberian kingdoms from across the border in Seville, but the Algarve had its own regional capital and huge, invulnerable fortress. The capital was Chelb (or Xelb), and it was bigger and better defended than Lisbon. Today the town, known as Silves, is a provincial outpost whose only besiegers are busloads of tourists who climb the narrow streets up to the old Moorish ramparts.

Where did the Christian Romans place a bishop, based in Faro?

Over the centuries, the living here has always been easy enough to attract a steady stream of immigrants. Bountiful food sources might have made Malaysia an inviting place for the contemporaries of Java Manin 230,000 b.c. But thus far, the country's earliest traces of homo sapiens, found in the Niah Caves of northern Sarawak, are fragments of a skull dating to 40,000 b.c. On the peninsula, the oldest human-related relics (10,000 b.c. ) are Stone Age tools of the Negritos. These small, dark Melanesians are related in type to Australian aborigines and are confined today to the forests of the northern highlands. By 2,000 b.c. , these timid, gentle nomads hunting with bow and arrow were driven back from the coasts by waves of sturdy immigrants arriving in outrigger canoes equipped with sails. Mongolians from South China and Polynesian and Malay peoples from the Philippines and the Indonesian islands settled along the rivers of the peninsula and northern Borneo. They practiced a slash-and-burn agriculture of yams and millet, a technique that exhausted the soil and imposed a semi-nomadic existence from one jungle clearing to another. Families lived in wooden longhouses like those still to be seen today among the Iban peoples of Sarawak. Another unit was added on to the communal dwelling each time a marriage created a new family. Other tough migrants from the South Seas settled along the coastssailors, fishermen, traders (for the most part pirates)known euphemistically as orang laut (sea people).

Why did the wooden longhouses grow larger over time?

Earth processes have not changed over time. The way things happen now is the same way things happened in the past. Mountains grow and mountains slowly wear away. The same process is at work the same as it was billions of years ago. As the environment changes, living creatures adapt. They change over time. Some organisms may not be able to adapt. They become extinct. Becoming extinct means they die out completely. Some geologists study the history of the Earth. They want to learn about Earths past. They use clues from rocks and fossils. They use these clues to make sense of events. The goal is to place things in the order they happened. They also want to know how long it took for those events to happen.
What are geologists?