Around the middle of the seventh millennium, a group of people moved into this area and lived here for the next 800 years, hunting wild animals, raising crops like, peas, and vetches, and raising livestock such as sheep and cattle, all the while trading seashells and hard volcanic stone mirrors made of obsidian.

Paintings and sculptures have been found in some of their rectangular mud-brick homes, which could only be entered from the roof, and in these rooms, some remarkable paintings and sculptures have been discovered.

Among them is a large-scale painting depicting a deer hunt painted in strong colours in silhouette, though very realistically, and even with some sense of weight and movement.

While earlier Paleolithic paintings were done on a natural surface, these are painted on prepared ground, or a smooth plastered wall. In spite of the lack of any ground or background lines, the figures still appear to be floating in a void, but the wall’s rectangular shape gives the image a sense of enclosure.

There had been a major step forward in the development of an image within a clearly defined ‘image field.’ Unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell how common this type of painting was.

Statuettes from the fifth and early fourth millennia have been discovered at Vinca, a Serbian site on the Danube River. They range from domestic and wild animals to human figures that can almost be mistaken for portraits in their sharpness of depiction.

Figures from Cernavoda on the lower Danube show yet another type of figure. A seated man with his elbows resting on his knees, and his hands on his chin, could be considered the first “thinker” in art history, despite his diminutive stature (only 4 1/2 inches,(5cm)) this highly expressive pose would be difficult to depict more economically and forcefully.