We have a Baptist pastor close by who who believes that the world is only six thousand years old.

He can't be swayed from his conviction - yet, at around the time that he imagines Adam and Eve talking to snakes, there was an advanced European civilisation in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills which predated the glory of Greece and Rome, and whose people 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 sizeable 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 head-dresses and necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.



NOTHING COMES CLOSE TO THIS TERRA COTTA WORK. COMPARE IT TO THE POTTERY OF ANCIENT EGYPT AND SEE.

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the culture’s visual language.

Until recent discoveries, the most intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terra cotta “goddess” figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and political power of women in society.

New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have approached the threshold of “civilization” status. Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.

THESE ARE EUROPE'S FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS: A PEOPLE TO BE PROUD OF.

The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an exhibition, “The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley, 5000-3500 B.C.,” which opened last month at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. More than 250 artifacts from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania are on display for the first time in the United States. The show will run through the 25th of April, 2010.














At its peak, around 4500 B.C., said David W. Anthony, the exhibition’s guest curator, “Old Europe was among the most sophisticated and technologically advanced places in the world - and was developing many of the political, technological and ideological signs of civilization.”

Thousands of years before Rodin, someone sculpted these pensive figures.