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They may not have access to Wi-Fi or indoor plumbing, but our cave ancestors were smarter and far more advanced than some people think. The analysis of some of the oldest cave drawings in the world revealed that some representations of animals drawn more than 40,000 years ago align with star constellations and may have be used as a cosmic calendar system to mark dates and events.
Researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Kent studied Neolithic and Paleolithic rock art, present in different parts of the European continent (Turkey, Spain, France and Germany). Even though the drawings were made thousands of years away, they share a tracking system of the date that follows the slow movement of the stars over time. "The results suggest that ancient peoples understood an effect caused by the gradual shift of the Earth's axis of rotation," wrote the University of Edinburgh in a statement. Known as "precession of the equinoxes", the discovery of the effect has been attributed to the ancient Greeks, but it seems that they are not the first.
The new information helped researchers uncover the secrets of ancient carvings, stone carvings and drawings to reveal that they were supposed to represent major comet strikes in 11,000, 15,000 and 32,000 before JC. "Early rock art shows that people had advanced knowledge of the night sky during the last ice age," said Dr. Martin Sweatman, lead author. "Intellectually, they hardly differed from us today, these results support a theory of the multiple impacts of comets during human development, and are likely to revolutionize the way prehistoric populations are perceived."
If the conclusions of this study are correct, the question that arises is: what did the prehistoric peoples still understand tens of thousands of years before us? And what do we still not realize, with our sophisticated machines and complex algorithms, about the world and the stars that prehistoric artists knew?
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