Talk:Prehistoric Romania
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I have some serious doubts about the accuracy of this article:
- The name Protopaleolithic is new to me, and Google only gives this page.
- I have never heard before that H. habilis ventured out of Africa, so what can tools made by him be doing in Romania?
Regards, Floris V 23:04, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
Ah yes. The issue of the pebble culture in Romania. The whole thing about the pebble culture came out the "research" done during the communist era. People found broken chert pebbles and said, "Hey! This looks like the artefacts found in southern Africa. It must be contemporary. Those artefacts are 2 million years old, so these must also be about the same age." There have never been found any homonid skeletons of equal age or even animal bones with signs of butchering. At that time though, the government wanted to prove to the world that Romania was important and that their ancestry could be traced back as far as possible, so anyone who found proof of such things was encouraged to continue their research and publish.
Even today there are still some people (mainly the old guys that originally wrote about this stuff) that still affirm that these theories are correct. If you are in Craiova, be sure to check out the history museum where you can learn more about "homo Olteniensis", the first homonids in Europe. Apparently these guys were contemporary with homo Habillis. According to the museum these are the ones that left behind the pebble culture artefacts. The museum was quick to get rid of it's communist memorabilia exhibits after the revolution, but 18 years later and this exhibit is still there.
The results of archaeology done in Romania up to about the mid-90s needs to be seriously questioned. Already, research being done here has indicated that a lot of past research done here was at best low quality, and in some cases purely fictional. A quick review of the field notes and museum inventories shows how much data was not recorded. Re-excavation of some sites also reveals that stratigraphies were incorrectly recorded (if recorded at all). A lot of artefacts that appear in reports have dissappeared or were not not properly catalogued (i.e. can't be found now). And if you think that loosing a few artefacts is bad enough, consider that a lot of actual excavation sites have also been lost. Some current archaeologists have spend weeks searching where whole Roman and Dacian fortifications are supposed to be and found nothing. It unfortunately puts a lot of the old research into question as it's very difficult to distinguish between the results of a good excavation and the results of someone who needed to publish something and "embellished" the facts in their reports.
I propose that the "proto-palaeolithic" category be removed entirely until someone can show a recent (scientific) report supporting it, or at least to note that this is not a main stream theory accepted by the majority of archaeologists (within or outside of Romania). --O crandell (talk) 20:49, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
