Who built Europe’s first cities?

Around 6,000 years ago, a group known as the Cucuteni–Trypillia culture built giant settlements of thousands of homes in what is now Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. These cities were notably egalitarian — all the houses were the same size, furnished similarly with beautifully crafted pottery, with no palaces, no grand temples and no signs of centralized administration. Then, after two millennia, the Cucuteni–Trypillia vanished. Scientists are starting to piece together the complex reasons why, from a cooling and drying climate to the rise of nomadic lifestyles brought by peoples from the eastern steppes — and perhaps a breakdown of the social equality that had served Cucuteni–Trypillia people for centuries.