Every city has an origin story, but Oslo’s begins before there was any city at all—before church towers, before harbour cranes, before kings, walls and streets. It begins when the ice loosened its grip on the land and the inner Oslofjord slowly opened again to life. Long before the name Oslo existed, people were already moving into this landscape after the last Ice Age. Archaeological research shows that Norway was first settled at the end of the glacial period, and that the Oslofjord region supported a broad network of Stone Age settlements between roughly 8000 and 2000 BC. The city’s deepest history, then, does not begin with a crown or a charter, but with shoreline, rock, water and the first human beings reading a new landscape for food, shelter and passage……