[The Sabbaticus]

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.

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

[pugsville]

I'd just be a little cautious in embracing this article without further research. I'm not hip at all with very early (pre)history. How much evidence? it may be the conditions in the mesopotomian region together with greek hostorical focus may well have led to excessive focus on one region and important stuff where may have not be unearthed, studied and given it's due weight. However popularizsed short of detail newspaper articles in science/history may well not convey the whole story.

Ahead of their time, seesh that always seems to be one of those logical contradiction phrases. (Militray intelligence, free market etc). i thnkpeople are always in their time, and think that gross statements that this or that culture is more advanced than this or that culture always strikes me as a gross simplifuication, by what standard? by whose values?

That said they might be something to this. Not an area I've researched.

[dugfromthearth]

Pre-Ur there were plenty of people living settled lives with towns and such.

There was trade and crafting long before farming. The plains indians had seashells they had gotten in trade from the coastal indians. There is nothing civilized or advanced about trade.

Farming did not create civilization as we define it. Farming created settlements. What created civilizations as we know it is massive irrigation projects.

Normally people farm the best land that requires the least work. Because you want the best land, it is found in small pockets. It has to have the right amount of rainfall, be near lakes or rivers, etc. So naturally farming tends to be in small settlements.

It is only if you are going to engage in engineering projects to make land arable that there is a benefit to having large numbers of people. If you are going to tame a river with irrigation so that you can control its flooding to benefit from its irrigation and its fertilization - that benefits from having thousands of people.

What we call civilization is just an arbitrary distinction. There were undoubtedly many settled cultures engaged in farming around Eurasia before Ur.

[Kon]

Settlements can also exist without farming (seaside gathering settlements ect) but they are usually likely seasonal. Prehistoric Europe had trade all up in it; rock quarrys in sites and Italy and Poland existed a long time before "civilization" and the stones where traded throughout the neolithic.

Interestingly farmers can and do exist in some areas nomadically; and modern farming likely sprung from gathering practices advancing.

[Thunderhawk]

I believe there is an archeological dig in south central Turkey around a (believed) religious holly site that was the nexus for a settlement that was fed by hunter-gatherers, it predated agriculture.

[Igor Antunov]

There were probably towns and even cities over 50,000 years ago. Agriculture is not needed, just a steady source of food, and that could easily be a coastal source, fish. Voilla.

[Cookie Monster]

There were probably towns and even cities over 50,000 years ago. Agriculture is not needed, just a steady source of food, and that could easily be a coastal source, fish. Voilla.

If I recall reading correctly, there were such pre-agricultural cities in the Andes region living from primarily anchovies.

[Igor Antunov]

^ Indeed.

But no doubt they were more vulnerable in the long run, because an interruption in food supply meant moving to greener pastures/mass starvation, these food sources may have been steady for some time but they were not hugely long-term. So such cities would have risen and fallen far more quickly. Basically not as long-lived as what came later, which limited societal development, specialisation and thus technology.

[ninurta]

Alot of research has been done on these people. They did have a form of writing, the Old European or Vinca script, though it was probably a form of protowriting.