Factoid of the day

Yesterday I was listening to a lecture by Professor Bulliet (of Columbia Univ) from his world history survey, and he mentioned that Mesopotamia might not have been the oldest place with cities since there were large towns in Roumania that predate those cities.

So a quick check and voila, you can find a NYTimes article about these towns and a short interview about them HERE.

,For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and built sizable towns, a few with as many as 10,000 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.

more links HERE.

 from the NYT article:

Dr. Anthony is a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., and author of “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.” Historians suggest that the arrival in southeastern Europe of people from the steppes may have contributed to the collapse of the Old Europe culture by 3500 B.C.

well, I actually have that book on my "to read" list on ScribD...

But for the last 8 months or so, I haven't been able to concentrate on such things... now I hope I am getting my brain back after the stress of Lolo's illness and death.