Large towns in southern Europe pre-dated Sumeria by two thousand years

Ben W. writes:

Interesting article in the New York Times showing that people in Europe were fairly well advanced BEFORE Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Unexpected!

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age. Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of “civilization” status.

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Jim V. writes:

This is unprecedented. I was made aware of these findings on my last trip to the Balkans. Skull and bone fragments have been dug up from one of the sites and used for a computer-graphic reconstruction of one of the inhabitants of this ancient civilization as he makes a crossing of the Danube.

Here it is: “Europe’s First Man.”

December 2

Paul V. writes:

According to Biblical chronology these sites and their artifacts would predate the flood. Sites dating from the same period will probably be unearthed in the Middle East and elsewhere now that they know to keep digging. While one must be grateful for the science that produced these finds, dated them and so forth, there is something repugnant about its language and the mentality behind it, unworthy of the objects and the people who made them. They are reduced to anthropological/sociological staples inimical to even a hint of the pietas that is owed to one’s ancestors. I may stand accused of asking the outdoorsy gentlemen with shovels and screens for more than they can provide; doubtless that is true. Nevertheless, the result of their materialist approach to man’s history and pre-history is a race denuded of a sense of the past, and thus of itself. All is appropriated into a present in which one’s reactions are all that count.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 30, 2009 11:30 PM | Send