INTRODUCTION :
The prehistory of France is only a fragment of the prodigious adventure that drove the man, come from the East, to get settled close to two millions year in the moderate zones. So begins a nit but sure demographic ascension. The harnessing of fire, toward 400 000 be-J.C., allows the men to resist the cold weather.
The population is henceforth possible, even though they are living of hunt and picking, remain sparse and nomadic. These first human beings have seized them in the discontinuity of the sites sometimes searched difficult to date and in their slow progress: improvement of the stone carved of the clumsy bifacial from the lower Palaeolithic, to the sophisticated laurel leaves of Solutre; the camps and the natural shelters perfection for the groupings of cabins of Pincevent.
With the birth of the worship thought, then the invention of the art toward 35 000 be-J.C., the conquests accelerate. But, it is necessary to wait for the great revolution of the Neolithic so that the man is capable to break the balance with the nature. Predators, our forebears, become food producers, village constructors, goods capitalisations. This transformation of the economic contributes to include our country in the European landscape. Come from the north and the East, get settled of the peoples, of which the Celtic toward 1200-800 be-J.C. its southern coasts open up to the contact of the Greek toward 600 be-J.C. and of the Etruscan, other people will arrive in successive waves. To the eve of the Roman conquest, the Gallic already have a long history behind them

The man of Cro-Magnon
It is a period of big cold weather. The man eats reindeers, bison and mammoths. He pulls his clothes of the skins of these animals and uses their bones to manufacture some tools. They make big progress in the domains of hunt, fishing and picking.

Icebox Period:
During the icebox period of the quaternary, a good part of Europe is a part under the oceanic waters, as ice, that covers the present firm earth. The vacant sea level lowers of more than 100m, discovering a part of the continental shelf: the British islands, for example, are joined to the continent. The plains of the north of Europe are covered with glaciers. In the Alps and the Pyrenees, the eternal snow descends until 1000m.

The paleoclimatology :
The paleoclimatology is the survey of the climatic variations during the various geological periods.
It enters therefore in the means of investigating of the prehistory. Thus, the traces let by four affluent of the Danube: Günz, Mindel, Riss and Würm, permitted to define the last four periods iceboxes of the quaternary, interrupted by interglacial periods.
Under the effect of the climate changes, fauna and flora alter: in hot period, soil covers itself of a luxuriant vegetation, the stream are large and edged of marshes, one meets the big deer of the peat-bogs, the tiger, the elephant and the hippo; the return of the cold weather entails the receding of the forests and the extension of the placed browsing steppe by herds of herbivores bison rhinoceros woolly, mammoth, and reindeer. They migrate to recover the favourable conditions to their survival; the men they adjust.

First traces:
In France, the most former testimonies of the human presence of the "Homo Erectus" are faceless: these are the five built tools found in Chilhac in the central Massif. It is showed that the human population should have begun from 1, 8 million of years nearly in these regions. What was this man that let on the stone his step traces? It is recovered on the high Roussillon terraces, where more than hundred camps were localised. IT is known that he came to take refuge in the underground cave of the Vallonet (Roquebrune-Cape-Martin) as in a lair, there are 950 000. It is in Europe, the oldest habitat in known underground cave. Its inhabitants reject the big bones of mammals against the partitions and bring districts of whale and the cervin woods fallen to soil. Such are their gestures and their food. In Seilhac, close to the puy, 800 000 years about before our era, the alignments of blocks of basalt and granite reveal a habitat of full air already structured among these hunters of elephants, rhinoceroses and hippos. But the tooling is very rudimentary: the pebbles arranged and the bifacial is even rare. The climatic variations are too important to fix the species, and no rest of hominine of this remote time has been discovered.