Interesting. AFAIK my own education in the field of history was by most standards quite comprehensive and yet I'd never heard of it either( * ). So I'm kind of grateful the NYT has decided to fill up some space with an overview of a culture they apparently suspect not everyone knows about :-)
* but then "comprehensive" means little more than "a thorough overview of basic Western European history starting with the ancient Greeks". It's not hard to imagine a history curriculum that spends more time on cultures before that.
As far as this specific culture is concerned, however, note the article says very little about it was known until 1972 and even after that, the knowledge was confined to Bulgaria and Romania, so it's at least somewhat understandable that it didn't make it into 5th grade curricula until after the Iron Curtain came down (by which time I was in 9th grade, btw).
I am sorry I didn't qualify my statement but I am from Eastern Europe. So we learned about it quite early.
I was being sneaky a little but the point was that when it come to "the oldest artifact...X", the "earliest...Y" it should be something that is taught and studied world-wide.
The downside is that we didn't study much American history, or at least not as much as I would have liked.
And I'm sorry I'm apparently so culturally myopic that the thought that you could've said what you said because you were actually from Eastern Europe didn't even occur to me.
* but then "comprehensive" means little more than "a thorough overview of basic Western European history starting with the ancient Greeks". It's not hard to imagine a history curriculum that spends more time on cultures before that.
As far as this specific culture is concerned, however, note the article says very little about it was known until 1972 and even after that, the knowledge was confined to Bulgaria and Romania, so it's at least somewhat understandable that it didn't make it into 5th grade curricula until after the Iron Curtain came down (by which time I was in 9th grade, btw).