Prehistoric Cave Paintings Show That Ancient People Had Pretty Advanced Knowledge of Astronomy

[Judi Lynn]

NOVEMBER 30, 2018 BY MATT WILLIAMS

Prehistoric Cave Paintings Show That Ancient People Had Pretty 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 extend 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 PhD 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.

More:
https://www.universetoday.com/140705/prehistoric-cave-paintings-show-that-ancient-people-had-pretty-advanced-knowledge-of-astronomy/

[greyl]

1. Light pollution prevents too many modern people from seeing the night sky.

https://twitter.com/hashtag/lightpollution?f=tweets&vertical=default

International Dark-Sky Association

Humans have been around for a few million years - see Little Foot -, and the article considers 40,000 years ago to be ancient.

[Eyeball_Kid]

2. See the comments

in the Universe Today article linked in the original posting.

[Victor_c3]

3. I grew up in a very rural area where the milky way is still visible

Outside of Lake Placid, NY or about 5 hours north of NYC in the Adirondacks. At night, the milky way is still visible.

I don’t get the chance to visit more than once or twice a year, but the night sky is staggeringly beautiful compared to what you can see in most other parts of the country. Light pollution really has taken a lot from us, another way in which our technology is removing us and our connections to the rest of nature.