Little is known of the earliest human settlement in Finland. As the glaciers receded at the end of the last Ice Age, the first permanent inhabitants of what is now Finland probably began arriving around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. Around this time the Baltic Sea formed, flooding what was a large freshwater lake. To this day, it’s one of the least saline of the major seas.But Finland was almost certainly inhabited long before this period. Re-cent finds of worked flint tools in a cave at Kristinestad suggest sporadic human presence as far back as 100,000 years ago, between Ice Ages.The first settlers in Finland came from Russia and present-day Estonia. These people hunted elk and beaver using stone tools and weapons and gradually spread out into the whole of the region. Sites have been found in southern Finland dating from around the eighth millennium BC. Pottery appears in archaeological records in the late sixth millennium BC, marking the beginning of the Late Stone Age, or Neolithic period. The discovery of ceramics makes it easier to identify broad groups of people, and it is clear that a new group arrived in southern Finland in 3000 BC or thereabouts. From this point on, we can see the development of definable Finno-Ugrian cultures. The central/northern culture, who had least cultural contact with the newcomers, have been labelled as proto-Sámi.The Bronze Age, from around 1700 BC to 600 BC, is characterised by strong trade contacts between southern Finland and other groups around the Baltic Sea, and the use of stone cairns for burials.