between warm and cold weather. During the Drenthe Stadium of the Wolstonian Stage, an ice sheet over Northern Germany covered the Ruhr and reached as far as the northern hills of the Central Uplands. The shape of the middle and lower Ruhr valley is due to meltwaters and the powerful force of the ice. Meltwater from the glaciers flowed westwards through the Ruhr valley. Where Essen lies today, this flow was temporarily hindered by a barrier of ice and rocky debris, forming an enormous lake which filled the valley at Schwerte. Pre-history 80,000 B.C. – The region of the present-day Ruhr was already settled during the Neanderthal period, around 80,000 years ago. During the building of the Rhine-Herne Canal in 1911, stone tools and traces of encampment with bones from woolly rhinoceros, bison and mammoth were found in Herne. Humanoids also settled elsewhere in the Emscher valley. Similar finds in the 1960s were made in Bottrop. 8700 BC. – In November 1978 stone-age flint instruments were found on the Kaiserberg in Duisburg which belong to the later phases of the last Ice Age and can be dated to about 9000 to 8000 BC. The oldest remains of modern humans in the area of the current Ruhr stem from the early Middle Stone Age. They were discovered in Spring 2004 in the Blätterhöhle in Hagen-Hohenlimburg. 6000–4500 BC – several settlements are known in the regions of Bochum, Hagen and Dortmund from the Linear Pottery culture and the Rössen culture. In Spring 2004, the skeletons of several humans from the Michelsberg culture were discovered in the Blätterhöhle in Hagen-Hohenlimburg. Among them was the skeleton of a 17–22-year woman. These finds are the single source of information for burials from this period in the current Rhine-Ruhr district. Antiquity 100 BC – Threat to the Celtic inhabitants by the Germanic Sicambri 12 BC – Construction of the Roman camp Asciburgium on the present-day boundary between Moers and Duisburg, the Kastell Werthhausen in present-day Duisburg-Rheinhausen and the legionary camp Vetera at Birten left of the Rhine and therefore on the boundary of the district and the later province of Germania Inferior. 11 BC – In order to control the Sicambri settled on the right-bank of the Rhine, Drusus erects a military camp at Oberaden. 8 BC – Re-settlement of the Sicambri to the left bank of the Lower Rhine, under the control of Vetera. The