Oldest European Civilization?

This is interesting, if true.

The Independent reports:

Archaeologists have discovered Europe's oldest civilisation, a network of dozens of temples, 2,000 years older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids.

More than 150 gigantic monuments have been located beneath the fields and cities of modern-day Germany, Austria and Slovakia. They were built 7,000 years ago, between 4800BC and 4600BC. Their discovery, revealed today by The Independent, will revolutionise the study of prehistoric Europe, where an appetite for monumental architecture was thought to have developed later than in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

Once again the hype is flowing. "Revolutionize" is perhaps too strong a term for the impact a discovery of linked religious sites will have -- if it indeed is true. Remember, this is the same paper that grossly overhyped an account of the use of new scanning techniques to recover texts from the Oxyrhynchus papyri.

Read the whole thing here.

Read about their previous reporting on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri here.