There is also another possible source of this error. In some J2EE / web containers (in my experience under Jboss 7.x and Tomcat 7.x) You have to add each class You want to use as a hibernate Entity into the file persistence.xml as
<class>com.yourCompanyName.WhateverEntityClass</class>
In case of jboss this concerns every entity class (local - i.e. within the project You are developing or in a library). In case of Tomcat 7.x this concerns only entity classes within libraries.