Prehistoric Cambodia is sparsely known, as a large area of modern-day Cambodia was under water at 6000 years ago. Evidence of cave dwellers has been found in the northwest of Cambodia with carbon dating on ceramic pots found in the area shows that they were made around 4200 BC, however historians finds it difficult to directly relate them with the modern Khmer.
A Khmer army going to war against the Cham, from a relief on the BayonArchaeologists discovered 1000 BC the peoples lived in houses on stilts and subsisted on a diet of fish and cultivated rice. Archaeological evidence indicates that parts of the region now called Cambodia were inhabited during the first and second millennia BCE by a Neolithic culture that may have migrated from southeastern China to the Indochinese Peninsula. By the first century CE the inhabitants had developed relatively stable, organized societies which had far surpassed the primitive stage in culture and technical skills. The most advanced groups lived along the coast and in the lower Mekong River valley and delta regions where they cultivated rice and kept domesticated animals. Recent research has unlock the discovery of artificial circular earthworks dating to Cambodia's Neolithic era.1
The Khmer people, one of the first inhabitants of South East Asia, were among the first in Southeast Asia to adopt religious ideas and political institutions from India and to establish centralized kingdoms encompassing large territories. The earliest known kingdom in the area, Funan, flourished from around the first to the sixth century A.D. It was succeeded by Chenla, which controlled large areas of modern Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand.
