Europe’s Forgotten Megacities: The Cucuteni-Trypillia

[00:00:00]What if I told you that 7,000 [music] years ago, Europeans lived in cities larger than Paris only to erase every [music] trace of their existence from history?

[00:00:09]This was the Cucuteni-Trypillian culture, a mysterious civilization that thrived [music] between modern-day Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania from 5400 to 2700 BCE.

[00:00:21]Their settlements were astonishingly [music] vast, with some housing up to 15,000 people. Unprecedented anywhere else [music] in Neolithic Europe, they constructed enormous circular towns with houses arranged [music] in precise concentric rings, and some cities sprawling over 800 acres.

[00:00:39]Even more baffling, every [music] 60 to 80 years, they deliberately burned their entire towns to the ground then rebuilt them atop the ashes, a ritual still [music] unexplained by archaeologists.

[00:00:51]Their pottery was among the most intricate of the ancient world, [music] adorned with hypnotic spirals and vivid colors that suggest a complex symbolic system. Despite their scale and sophistication, they left no written records. Their civilization collapsed suddenly, and the cause remains one of history's greatest enigmas.

[00:01:10]Was it climate change, invasion, or something even stranger that wiped them from the map? To this day, scholars are still searching for answers.