Mesolithic hunting, fishing, and gathering populations survived alongside farmers down to the third millenium BCE (Andrew Sherratt, The Transformation of Early Agrarian Europe, in Prehistoric Europe Barry Cunliffe (Ed), Oxford University Press, 1994).

Finno-Ugric tribes settled in a broad swath of territory from Scandinavia to the Urals Mountains in a region known to the civilized world of the Roman Empire as the source of amber. With no well-defined natural borders, the predecessors of the modern Estonians came successively under pressure by the Germanic tribes and then the Slavs. In later centuries, as with the neighboring fuedal societies, the Estonian ruling elite was too weakened by internal strife to resist Scandinavian and German domination.

While Estonia has been mostly Christian since about the 13th century, traditionally the people "worshipped the forces of nature, personified as divinities, in sacred oak groves. Their religious and cultural life is primarily known from the large body of folk songs ... much of which has survived. The songs encompassed the totality of human life in communion with nature and reveal a strong sense of ethics.... The spiritual world of the Estonians is known largely from their epic poem, Kalevipoeg, a 19th-century compilation of an extensive body of surviving folk song and shamanic chant" (Encyclopedia Britannica, CD-ROM, 2003).

Recent initiatives to protect and restore the natural environment of Estonia may be a reflection of cultural traditions that have been lost for millennia in other parts of Europe. It is probably not a coincidence that the folk-hero, Kalevipoeg, was said to have dug a well in Lake Männikjärve, the second largest lake in the Endla Nature Reserve. Excursion Guide (PDF 43K)