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A scene painted on a cave wall more than 15,000,000 years ago seems to tell the simple story of a hunter who collapsed in front of a disemboweled animal. By reading between the lines, the images could describe something bigger. Maybe even astronomical.
According to a new badysis of the work, the characters represented in the famous prehistoric paintings of Lascaux were well placed. These are not simple hunting stories. University researchers from Edinburgh and Kent compared zoomorphic works found in Neolithic sites around the world, from Göbekli Tepe in Çatalhöyük, Turkey, to the nearby caves of Montignac in the south-west of the country. La France.
Pet representations, such as bulls, lions and scorpions, are not meant to represent scenes of a familiar appearance, they say. Instead, they could symbolize the constellations and, as such, represent an early form of astronomical record keeping.
"Early rock art shows that people had advanced knowledge of the night sky during the last ice age," says one of the study's authors. , Chemical Engineer Martin Sweatman of the University of Edinburgh.
If this is true, the scenes drawn at Lascaux might rather mark the date of a major event that coincided with an annual Taurid meteorite shower about 17,000 years ago.
? Last year, the same researchers decoded stone sculptures discovered at Göbekli Tepe in reference to a comet strike supposed to be responsible for a temporary return to the ice age's climate conditions there are about 13,000 years.
This new study further pushes the badysis by applying it to other Neolithic works of art from other sites and from time to time.
The paintings of Lascaux were discovered by a local group of teenagers in the 1940s. Our heads on them ever since. The exact date of their creation is unclear, but experts estimate that the 600 images scattered on the walls date back to 17,000 years ago.
Many characters represent animals that would have lived in the area, including horses and bison. resembling animals called aurochs.
The images known collectively as the Shaft Scene include a bent human figure next to an auroch, which has loops of his gut that hangs from his belly.
Nearby, there is something that looks a little like a duck, while a rhinoceros looks to the left. A horse's head is sketched on another part of the wall.
We can all guess why someone would bother to crawl into a cave to awkwardly inscribe a man who would flip over in front of a gutted animal while a creepy bird is watching and a rhinoceros pretends not to not notice it … and many historians have their opinions.
The caves are considered supernatural places related to deities, etc., so it is possible that these images were drawn seeking God's favor before a hunt, such as a prehistoric wish list or a form of prayer.
noticed the proximity of various animals around the caves seems to be less than random. The French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan understood in the 1960s that this represented a kind of clbadification system, good and bad or masculine and feminine.
There are also geometric shapes, dots and strange lines scattered throughout the images that are difficult to explain if it was trying to draw realistically natural frames.
The idea that they may somehow reflect not pastoral but heavenly scenes has been discussed for over 40 years.
Sweatman and his colleague from the University of Kent, Alistair Coombs, now believe that this approach is the right one and that we should give more credit to our ancestors when it comes to representing the
"On the intellectual plane, they were little different from us today, "Sweatman says.
Like the Göbekli Tepe vulture stone, the Shaft scene represents a human figure that seems to be dying, almost four prominent animals. [19659009]
Researchers claim that the wounded buffalo represents the Capricorn constellation at the summer equinox and that the bird replaces Libra at the spring equinox. The other animals are more speculative, but could easily match Leo and Taurus to the other equinoxes.
This arrangement could mark a date of 15,150 BC, about two centuries later, suggesting an event that could have affected humans in a less than pleasant way.
Records taken from Greenland ice cores suggest that the climate began to change around 15,300 BCE, but nothing indicates that it was caused by some sort of meteorite impact .
and paint animals for tens of thousands of years, and the reason we do it is not always clear.
The 40,000-year-old sculpture of a standing lion discovered in the Hohlenstein Cave in Germany is another strange example to which Sweatman and Coombs are paying attention.
"These findings support a theory of the multiple impacts of comets during human development, and are likely to revolutionize the way prehistoric populations are perceived," says Sweatman.
There is no doubt that historians will continue to explain the meaning of the term ancient art for a long time.
These findings show that perhaps we should pbad strictly shamanic interpretations to consider art as an integral part of the marking of time based on a daring feature of the environment. we often forget in our modern world – the night sky.
This research was published in Athens Journal of History .
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