How early men used rock art to understand the night sky

Reveals early rock art It was not just about animal representations and other terrestrial scenes. The truth is much more symbolic and much more starred.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have published new findings suggesting that prehistoric cave dwellers had a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the sky. The studied work, from caves in Turkey, France, Spain and Germany, shows a coherent set of symbols (a key, if you will) that reveal how ancient peoples followed astronomical events. Like the animal shapes of our constellations and astrological zodiac signs, these drawings also illustrate a correlation between animals and the placement of stars at a given moment.

Dr. Martin Sweatman, professor at the University of Edinburgh and co-author of the article, led the team that studied these examples of Paleolithic and Neolithic art to decode their carefully chosen symbols. They chemically dated the used paints and used the "Stellarium" software to calculate the position of the constellations at the appropriate solstices and equinoxes. By comparing the radioactive carbon dates of the art with the software results, Sweatman said the team had "found an extraordinary level of concordance". Astronomy of a people previously considered primitive. Their knowledge of the sky suggests a similar knowledge of the seas, which probably facilitated navigation and, by transitory property, prehistoric human migration.

Last year, Sweatman and a colleague decoded the works of art of Gobekli Tepe, a former Turkish archaeological site whose origin would be about 11,000 BC. J. – C. Based on the astronomical knowledge observed at this place, Sweatman realized that it must exist well before 11 000 BC. From there, Sweatman expanded his work to other locations and began working with Alistair Coombs (the co-author of this article) to decode other paintings "like crossword solving," he says. .

In the Dordogne region, France, the relatively well-known scene of Lascaux Shaft includes a dying man surrounded by a horse, a buffalo, a bird, a rhinoceros and a geometric shapes. Although this Upper Paleolithic mural has already been interpreted as an abstract narrative of life and death, this article now suggests that it commemorates a comet strike that occurred around 15 200 BC. Sweatman says that this scene "describes a major prejudicial event of the Capricornus leadership. It is likely that this refers to a collision with cometary debris from the Taurid meteorite stream. "These results support the theory of" coherent catastrophism "which, according to Sweatman," describes how a giant comet remained trapped in the internal solar system several thousand times. Many years ago, we created a stream of debris with which we collide every few thousand years. This is significant because these debris remain in our orbit, although irregularly.

The first observation of the constellations is largely attributed to the Babylonians about 4,000 years ago, and the discovery of the "precession of the equinoxes" (a phenomenon that describes how the correspondence of the constellations with the equinoxes and the solstices evolves very slightly over the course of time. time) is generally recognized. at Hipparchus of ancient Greece, 2nd century BC. But the conclusions of Sweatman and Coombs challenge the accepted "truths". "We have shown the same constellations and precursions known for more than 35,000 years," he says. For this reason, humans of this era must have been relatively intelligent. "Our work shows that they also had a scientific mind: they could observe nature and predict how stars would evolve over time. This shows that they are hardly any different intellectually from us today.

The common method of keeping records across different places, peoples and times shows a shared human understanding of the astral world. Although there are probably minor variations, Sweatman assumes that "their art and their astronomy were all related to an ancient mythology … so it was probably a central part of their lives – maybe that's what it's all about. And so they understood the nature. "Based on the consistency of the results found Through different ancient works of art, these generally accepted astronomical timekeeping codes were certainly not limited to not in Western Europe and Turkey.

Modern astronomy supports the hypothesis that these ancient peoples have followed the evolution of time by recording the slowly changing positions of the stars. Although we still use the same constellations, Sweatman says most symbols have changed over the last 40,000 years. "Some exchanged their positions: for example, the bull went from Capricorn to Taurus, the Lion went from Cancer to Leo". Thus, the astrological animal symbols that we use to describe and locate objects in the sky come from a long history of scientifically accurate rock art.