Cave paintings reveal ancient Europeans' knowledge of the stars

[Judi Lynn]

Cave art suggests that ancient people had a good grasp of the night sky, and drew images of animals to depict constellations.

By Jason Goodyer
29th January, 2019 at 00:00

Ancient people across Europe might have known more about the stars than we give them credit for, according to a new analysis of cave art from the University of Edinburgh.

Some of the world’s oldest cave paintings are now thought to depict not wild animals as was previously thought, but constellations in the night sky. This suggests that in these artworks, people were using the positions of constellations to represent dates, and mark events such as comets hitting Earth.

The researchers looked at Palaeolithic and Neolithic art featuring animal symbols at sites in Turkey, Spain, France and Germany. The examples of art they looked at varied in age by tens of thousands of years, but the system for representing dates with constellations appears to be constant throughout.

Some of the art in question dates back as far as 40,000 years ago, around the time Neanderthals became extinct.

More:
https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/cave-paintings-reveal-ancient-europeans-knowledge-of-the-stars/

[FirstLight]

1. ...

Of course our Ancestors knew more than we credit them for...

I wonder what future generations will say about us...

[Igel]

2. And yet that doesn't mean they knew more than we did 200 years ago.

"Not A" doesn't entail "C" unless there's a connection.

This makes big claims. With ironclad evidence, unless you look at the quality of it and of the analysis. And the certitude to state that if there's any opposing view, it must be wrong and not worth discussing because this particular claim is so solidly proven to be correct.

For example. There's a bone with notches on it that's been claimed to show knowledge of some luni-solar phenomenon. I forget even what it was. But the first thing the researchers did was find something that the bone could represent that's astronomical. Then they counted the notches. They found the distance between them. They tossed the notches that don't fit. They corrected the distances to make them fit--how could you be precise in prehistory. They then assumed that notches that should be there were somehow worn off. And they had their conclusive proof, because there was a perfect match between the number of notches, the relative distances, and the astronomical calculations. A lot of people bought it, because to think otherwise was dissing people in the paleolithic and saying that we must be smarter.

Hint: We may not be more intelligent, but we're smarter.

Of course, the first real leap of faith (and not logic) was that it had to be something represented on the bone, and that something had to be astronomical. And not just somebody counting something (like years or deer killed or women impregnated) or something even more routine, like somebody showing that his knife is really, really sharp. Or, even worse, the notches resulting from cutting the meat off the bone.