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Some ancient rock paintings supposed to be animal symbols actually represent star constellations, according to scientists.
New research suggests that humans had sophisticated knowledge of stars 40,000 years ago.
They also seem to have followed the time observing how the stars are slowly changing position in the night sky.
The phenomenon, known as precession of the equinoxes, is caused by the progressive displacement of the axis of rotation of the Earth.
His discovery had been previously credited to the Greeks of antiquity thousands of years later.
According to the researchers, cave artists have turned to the stars to mark major events such as comet strikes.
"Early rock art shows that people had advanced knowledge of the night sky during the last ice age." Intellectually, they were hardly any different from us today, "he said. Dr. Martin Sweatman, Head of the Study, Edinburgh University.
Teams from the Universities of Edinburgh and Kent studied Paleolithic and Neolithic rock art sites in Turkey, Spain, France and Germany.
The images of animal symbols painted on cave walls have been aged by chemical dating of the paintings used.
Computer software was then used to predict the position of the stars when painting.
The results showed that what looked like abstract representations of animals could be interpreted as a sign of the zodiac based on the constellations as they appeared at the time.
Scientists have claimed that at each site, cave artists practice a timekeeping method based on astronomy.
This is despite the fact that the paintings have been separated in time by tens of thousands of years.
The world's oldest sculpture, the Lion Man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave in Germany, is an ivory sculpture over 40,000 years old that also supports the theory of the zodiac symbol.
In an article in the Athens Journal of Athens, researchers described how an ancient carved stone pillar from Gobekli Tepe in Turkey provided them with their "Rosetta Stone" – the key to unlocking the zodiacal code.
It was thought to commemorate the devastating impact of meteors in North America 11,000 years ago, at the origin of the Younger Dryas event, a period of sudden cooling of the climate that triggered a mini-ice age in Canada. 'northern hemisphere.
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