Apologies for bumping a thread for a minor point, but…well, but I’m doing so…
Not correct. The longa and brevis were the mainstay of centuries of rhythmic notation, with fixed relationships variously into groups of twos or threes (ancestors of our simple and compound time signatures).
One peculiarity of European musical history is that notation has tended towards shorter and shorter note values. The brevis replaced the longa as the ‘large’ note. And the semibreve then became the typical one, enough so to be meaningfully described as a whole note in many situations. Get into the 20th century and quavers are often the main beat (I’m thinking Webern, for instance). And I’ve played new works where the basic pulse is notated as semiquavers.