The valleys of the Alps have been inhabited since prehistoric times. The Alpine culture, which developed there, centers on transhumance.
Currently the Alps are divided among eight countries: France, Monaco, Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany and Slovenia. In 1991 the Alpine Convention was established to regulate this transnational area, whose area measures about .
Early history (before 1200) The Wildkirchli caves in the Appenzell Alps show traces of Neanderthal habitation (about 40,000 BCE). During the Würm glaciation (up to c. 11700 BP), the entire Alps were covered in ice. Anatomically modern humans reach the Alpine region by c. 30,000 years ago. MtDNA Haplogroup K (believed to have originated in the mid-Upper Paleolithic, between about 30,000 and 22,000 years ago, with an estimated age here of c. 12,000 years BP), is a genetic marker associated with southeastern Alpine region.
Traces of transhumance appear in the neolithic. In the Bronze Age, the Alps formed the boundary of the Urnfield and Terramare cultures. The mummy found on the Ötztal Alps, known as "Ötzi the Iceman", lived c. 3200 BC. At that stage the population in its majority had already changed from an economy based on hunting and gathering to one based on agriculture and animal husbandry. It is still an open question whether forms of pastoral mobility, such as transhumance (alpiculture), already existed in prehistory.
The earliest historical accounts date to the Roman period, mostly due to Greco-Roman ethnography, with some epigraphic evidence due to the Raetians, Lepontii and Gauls, with Ligurians and Venetii occupying the fringes in the south-west and south-east, respectively (Cisalpine Gaul) during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. The Rock Drawings in Valcamonica date to this period. A few details have come down to modern scholars of the conquest of many of the Alpine tribes by Augustus, as well as Hannibal's battles across the Alps. Most of the local Gallic tribes allied themselves with the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War, for the duration of which Rome lost control over most of Northern Italy. The Roman conquest of Italy was only complete after the Roman victory over Carthage, by the 190s BC.
Between 35 and 6 BC, the Alpine region was gradually integrated into the expanding Roman Empire. The contemporary monument Tropaeum Alpium in La Turbie celebrates the victory won by the Romans over 46 tribes in these mountains. The subsequent construction of roads over the Alpine passes first permitted southern and northern Roman settlements in the Alps to be connected, and eventually integrated the inhabitants of the Alps into the culture of the Empire. The upper Rhône Valley or Vallis Poenina fell to the Romans after a battle at Octodurus (Martigny) in 57 BC. Aosta was founded in 25 BC as Augusta Praetoria Salassorum in the former territory of the Salassi. Raetia was conquered in 15 BC.
With the division of the Roman Empire and the collapse of its Western part in the fourth and fifth centuries, power relations in the Alpine region reverted to their local dimensions. Often dioceses became important centres. While in Italy and Southern France, dioceses in the Western Alps were established early (beginning in the fourth century) and resulted in numerous small sees, in the Eastern Alps such foundations continued into the thirteenth century and the dioceses were usually larger. New monasteries in the mountain valleys also promoted the Christianisation of the population. In that period the core area of supra-regional political powers was mainly situated north of the Alps, first in the Carolingian Empire and later, after its division, in France and the Holy Roman Empire. The German emperors, who received the imperial investiture from the Pope in Rome between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries, had to cross the Alps along with their entourages.
In the 7th century, much of the Eastern Alps were settled by Slavs. Between the 7th and 9th century, the Slavic principality of Carantania existed as one of the few non-Germanic polities in the Alps. The Alpine Slavs, who inhabited the majority of present-day Austria and Slovenia, were gradually Germanized from the 9th to the 14th century. The modern Slovenes are their southernmost descendants.
The successive emigration and occupation of the Alpine region by the Alemanni from the 6th to the 8th centuries are, too, known only in outline. For "mainstream" history, the Frankish and later the Habsburg empire, the Alps had strategic importance as an obstacle, not as a landscape, and the Alpine passes have consequently had great significance militarily.