These Prehistoric Cave Paintings Show Advanced Knowledge of Astronomy
Astronomy is one of humanity's oldest obsessions, reaching back all the way to prehistoric times. Long before the Scientific Revolution taught us that the sun is at the center of the Solar System, or modern astronomy revealed the true extent of our galaxy and the universe, ancient peoples were looking up at the night sky and finding patterns in the stars.
For some time, scholars believed that an understanding of complex astronomical phenomena (like the precession of the equinoxes) did not predate the ancient Greeks. However, researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Kent recently revealed findings that show how ancient cave paintings that date back to 40,000 years ago may, in fact, be astronomical calendars that monitored the equinoxes and kept track of major events.
The team's study,"Decoding European Palaeolithic Art: Extremely Ancient knowledge of Precession of the Equinoxes,"recently appeared in the Athens Journal of History. The study team included Martin B. Sweatman (an associate professor at the University of Edinburgh's School of Engineering) and Alistair Coombs — a researcher and Ph.D. candidate with the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kent.
Together, Sweatman and Coombs studied the details of Paleolithic and Neolithic art featuring animal symbols at sites located in Turkey, Spain, France, and Germany. What they found was that all of these sites used the same method of date-keeping, even though the artwork was created by people living tens of thousands of kilometers and years apart.
According to the team's analysis, the cave paintings were not simply depictions of wild animals (as previously thought) but instead represented star constellations in the night sky. These paintings were apparently used to represent dates and mark major astronomical events like comet strikes. In this sense, they demonstrate that ancient humans kept track of time by monitoring the precession of the equinoxes.
This refers to the phenomenon where the constellations appear to slowly shift in the sky in a cycle that spans a period of roughly 25,920 years. This is the result of axial precession: a slow, continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body's rotational axis. To an Earth-bound observer, the equinoxes appeared to move westward along the ecliptic relative to the background stars and in the opposite direction of the sun.
As Dr. Martin Sweatman, a professor with the University of Edinburgh's School of Engineering, explained in a recent U of E press release:
"Early cave art shows that people had advanced knowledge of the night sky within the last ice age. Intellectually, they were hardly any different to us today. These findings support a theory of multiple comet impacts over the course of human development, and will probably revolutionize how prehistoric populations are seen."
No comments:
Post a Comment