Traces of human communities and their cultures run all through this province — in the city centre itself, up the Kızılırmak valley, at Kavak and Tekkeköy and out across the Çarşamba plain. In the Mesolithic, between 10000 and 5000 BC, people lived in the shelters at Tekkeköy, and they are the oldest inhabitants the province knows. Excavation has shown that in the Neolithic and through the Copper and Bronze Ages settlement continued at Dündar Tepe in the city, Kalenderoğlu at Kavak and İkiztepe at Bafra.
The oldest people to form a state within the province were the Kaška. After them the Paphlagonians, who dominated the whole of northern Anatolia, lived in the Kızılırmak basin. The Hittites founded their holy city of Nerik here. Phrygians, Cimmerians and Lydians followed, and it was in this period that a town called Enete was founded at the place now known as Kara Samsun.
