In the warmer periods of the last Ice Age (50,000-10,000 years ago), small groups of hunter/gatherers, probably Neanderthals, lived in Eemland. Their contemporaries in France lived in caves, but here they stayed in the open air. They lived by hunting large and small game and fishing. But they were also scavengers and ate what wild animals left behind. They made various types of tools from flint: triangular points, scrapers (for scraping hides or planing wood), anvils and hand axes. The raw material could be found nearby in the form of flint nodules, which were supplied via the Meuse.

Oldest finds

The oldest finds in the Netherlands date from the middle of the Old Stone Age (250,000-200,000 years ago). These were excavated near Rhenen on the Utrechtse Heuvelrug. In a sand quarry, layers of soil come to the surface from a warmer period, when the first people came to live in our area.