Via Forbes.com
Brid-Aine Parnell
Contributor
If you thought prehistoric cave art was just daubs of hunting scenes, you need to think again. The latest research suggests that some of the oldest cave paintings in the world were ancient representations of astronomy.
Researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Kent studied details of drawings in caves in Turkey, Spain, France and Germany that showed various animal symbols. They claim that all of them used the same method of keeping the time using sophisticated astronomy, even though the art was drawn at various times over tens of thousands of years.
“Early cave art shows that people had advanced knowledge of the night sky within the last Ice Age. Intellectually, they were hardly any different to us today. These findings support a theory of multiple comet impacts over the course of human development, and will probably revolutionise how prehistoric populations are seen,” said Martin Sweatman of the University of Edinburgh in a statement.
This isn’t the first time that historians have suggested cave art might be linked to astronomy. Researchers earlier found that stone carvings at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey could be interpreted as a memorial to a comet strike around 11,000 BC that initiated a mini ice-age.
For this study, researchers used the chemical date of the paints used to age many examples of cave art and then compared them to the positions of stars in ancient times. They found that images of animals may have been used to represent constellations and mark events like comet strikes and important dates.
If they are correct, these pictures also prove that ancient people understood an effect caused by the gradual shift of the Earth’s rotational axis called the precession of the equinoxes, a discovery previously credited to the ancient Greeks.
Astronomical knowledge could have helped these prehistoric people to navigate on ocean voyages, changing our understanding of how humans migrated around the world.
The study was published in the Athens Journal of History.
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