“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 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.
According to the team’s analysis, the cave paintings were not simply depictions of wild animals (as previously thought) but instead represented star constellations in the night sky.
These paintings were apparently used to represent dates and mark major astronomical events like comet strikes.
In this sense, they demonstrate that ancient humans kept track of time by monitoring the precession of the equinoxes.”
[A really brilliant story in Universe Today!! The more we discover about the abilities of ancient peoples to accurately observe and record live-sky events many millennia ago, the more we begin to understand that temporary celestial phenomena, events such as comet and asteroid strikes, are the likeliest of celestial encounters they would have recorded.
That such events were catastrophic goes almost without saying, but there is strong resistance by archaeologists and prehistorians to the very idea that these ancient peoples were as intellectually capable as we are today – and probably moreso.
This study shows that our interpretation of ancient celestial events needs to be as much urgently reviewed as the standard paradigm of the abilities of ancient peoples. to accurately record them.
You can find the original study by Sweatman and Coombs referred to
here, and is essential reading for those wanting a more accurate view of prehistoric peoples abilities to observe and record events they witnessed in the ancient skies.
It’s well worth a visit to read the full story, and do read the original study as well – Ed]
“Researchers have determined that ancient Egyptians were well aware of the variability of the Algol triple star system thousands of years before modern astronomers after studying the Cairo Calendar, which documents this star system’s brightness.
As Phys.org reports, the Cairo Calendar has also been called the Calendar of Lucky or Unlucky Days and was determined to have been written between the years 1244 and 1163 BC.
This special calendar would have allowed Egyptians to learn what days were either favourable or unfavourable for them by assigning particular days, and even certain times during these days, as either good days or bad days.
But besides allowing ancient Egyptians the opportunity to decide whether certain days would be good or not, the Cairo Calendar was also found to have had an astronomical function, which included ascertaining the changing brightness of Algol.”
[An excellent story from Inquisitr! The more we discover about the abilities of ancient peoples in general, and the ancient Egyptians in particular. to accurately observe and record live-sky events many millennia ago, the more we begin to understand that mainstream archaeology has concocted a very inadequste picture of the ancient peoples of Africa. It’s well worth a visit to read the full story and see the images and video – Ed]
[A really great story from Stuff! Why such a great ancient civilisation went into decline and crashed so quickly is the subject of great controversy and debate. It’s well worth a visit to read the full story and see the many images, diagrams and video – Ed]
“Ever since humans could look up to see the sky, we have been amazed by its beauty and untold mysteries. Naturally then, astronomy is often described as the oldest of the sciences, inspiring people for thousands of years.
Celestial phenomena are featured in prehistoric cave paintings.
And monuments such as the Great Pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge seem to be aligned with precision to cardinal points or the positions where the moon, sun or stars rise and set on the horizon.
Today, we seem to struggle to imagine how ancient people could build and orient such structures. This has led to many assumptions.
Some suggest prehistoric people must have had some knowledge of mathematics and sciences to do this, whereas others go so far as to speculate that alien visitors showed them how to do it.
But what do we actually know about how people of the past understood the sky and developed a cosmology?”
[A really fascinating article from Heritage Daily! One of the main focal points of The Morien Institute research has been the obvious fascination ancient peoples worldwide had with events observed in the skies, and this article is a welcome addition to the growing corpus of research about ancient astronomy as reflected in all aspects of the monuments they left behind.
So to answer the question in the title – ‘were prehistoric people astronomers?’ – YES it’s very obvious that they were, and they certainly didn’t need any ancient aliens to help them.
In fact, ancient African peoples were far more intelligent and capable not only of recording accurate observations of celestial events than they have ever been given credit for by the authors of the Euro-centric version of prehistory that has been taught in schools, colleges and universities over the past 200+ years, but also of recording those observations in accurately positioned megalithic monuments on almost every continent.
In fact, it is becoming blatantly obvious that ‘Out of Africa’ came the science of the ancient world, which they spread to amlost every corner of it. It’s well worth a visit to read the full story and follow many of the expertly selected relevant links – Ed]
“Though it’s slightly lopsided, the towering Great Pyramid of Giza is an ancient feat of engineering, and now an archaeologist has figured out how the Egyptians may have aligned the monument almost perfectly along the cardinal points, north-south-east-west – they may have used the fall equinox.
The fall equinox occurs halfway between the summer and winter solstices, when Earth’s tilt is such that the length of the day and night are almost the same.
About 4,500 years ago, Egyptian pharaoh Khufu had the Great Pyramid of Giza constructed; it is the largest of the three pyramids – now standing about 455 feet (138 meters) tall – on the Giza Plateau and was considered a ‘wonder of the world’ by ancient writers.
Turns out, the pyramid builders somehow designed this ancient wonder with extreme precision.
‘The builders of the Great Pyramid of Khufu aligned the great monument to the cardinal points with an accuracy of better than four minutes of arc, or one-fifteenth of one degree’, Glen Dash, an engineer who studies the Giza pyramids, wrote in a paper published recently in The Journal of Ancient Egyptian Architecture.”
[An interesting story, but the use of sticks and stone gnonoms to determine solar positions has been known about for some time. They also used distance hills and mountain peaks to determine the exact times and days of the equinoxes and solstices as viewed from appropriate backsites. It’s worth a visit to read the full story and see the diagram – Ed]
“For decades, stone carvings unearthed in the Himalayan territory of Kashmir were thought to depict a hunting scene.
But the presence of two celestial objects in the drawings has piqued the interest of a group of Indian astronomers.
According to a study published in the Indian Journal of History of Science, the Kashmir rock drawings may be the oldest depiction of a supernova, the final explosion of a dying star, ever discovered.
Archaeologists found the carvings nearly half a century ago in Kashmir’s Burzahama site, where the oldest settlements have been dated to about 4,300BC.
It showed two hunters, a bull, and two beaming disks in the sky initially speculated to be two suns.
That explanation did not satisfy Mayank Vahia and a team of astrophysicists in India and Germany.
They settled on Supernova HB9, a star that exploded around 4,600BC.
Viewed from Kashmir, the supernova would have occurred somewhere near the Orion constellation, ‘Which is known as the scene of a hunter’, said Vahia
‘The supernova also went off just above the constellation of Taurus, the bull, which is also seen in the drawing’, Vahia added.”
[What an amazing story from The Guardian! Well Done! The many ways and symbols used by ancient peoples to depict events they observed in the skies continue to again surprise us.
But it should also be remembered that in that area of the sky at those times was the bright fragmenting comet known as proto-Encke, which was responsible for many bombardments of Earth with cometary debris from the Taurid debris streams. Two large pieces of any fragmenting comet may well appear as two suns to observers on Earth.
A full review of all ancient petroglyphs and carvings is urgently needed, and it may be better directed by open-minded astronomers than left to mainstream archaeologitsts – but take them along too as they may well learn something useful.
It’s well worth a visit to read the full story and see the images of the carvings and their projection onto a star chart – Ed]
“A team of archaeologists in Mexico have discovered a stone shrine in a pond that depicts the design of the universe, as imagined by ancient Aztec civilisations.
The stone “tetzacualco” or sanctuary was found at Nahualac, a site at the foothills of the Iztaccihuatl volcano.
According to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), along with the stone shrine, ceramic fragments, lithic materials, lapidaries and organic remains were found nearby, which have been associated with the Aztec rain god Tlaloc.
The researchers have surmised that the placement of the stones is meant to portray a miniature model of the mythical universe.
The placement itself creates the effect of making it seem like the stones are ‘floating’ on the water’s surface rather than lying on the pond bed.”
[A great story from IB Times! The ingenuity of ancient peoples when portraying the cosmos never ceases to amaze as new discoveries uncover very, very different ways of perceiving the universe that do modern peoples. It’s well worth a visit to read the full story and see the images – Ed]
“An 1,800-year-old temple in northern England that is dedicated to the god Mithras was built to align with the rising sun on Dec. 25, a physics professor has found.
The temple is located beside a Roman fort in Carrawburgh, near Hadrian’s Wall, which served as the most northerly frontier to the Roman Empire, beginning around AD 122.
Some modern-day scholars believe that the Romans celebrated Mithras’ birthday on Dec. 25 – the same day eventually chosen by Christians to celebrate the birth of Christ.
Using satellite imagery and astronomical software that shows the direction of the sunrises and sunsets, ‘we can easily see that the building is in good alignment along the sunrise on December 25’, wrote Amelia Carolina Sparavigna, a physics professor at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy, in a paper published online recently in the journal Philica. The paper has not been peer reviewed.
There is also an alignment between the Mithras temple and the rising sun on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, Sparavigna said.
Roger Beck, an emeritus professor of Classics at the University of Toronto, who has written extensively on the cult of Mithras, said that he hypothesized that such an alignment existed in a paper published in 1984 in the journal Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen.
In that 1984 paper, he speculated that the rays of the sun might have illuminated a statue and altar within the Mithras temple on the winter solstice.
In his 1984 paper, Beck did not propose that the reason for such an alignment was to celebrate the birthday of the god Mithras on Dec. 25, and he’s skeptical that the Romans celebrated the god’s birth on that day.”
[A great story from Netral News to open the new year with, and all the more so because of the Decmber 21 Winter Solstice confusion with December 25th – the supposed birth of Jesus. The solsticial sunrise itself was not what they were observing ritually but scientifically.
The ritual sunrise observation was the following day when the sun began to rise higher in the sky and was portrayed as ‘reborn’. This ritual was true of many ancient cultures, as was the scientific observation on the solstice day itself. It represented a marking point from which to start the new solar year. Well worth a visit to read the full story and see the temple image – Ed]
Astro-Archaeology & Archaeoastronomy Discoveries that were
“A German academic believes he has solved one of Malta’s enduring archaeological enigmas and intends to sail the Mediterranean on a replica Bronze Age vessel to prove it.
The Tal-Qadi Stone, discovered at the temple complex of the same name in Salina and exhibited at the National Museum of Archaeology, in Valletta, is a book-sized limestone slab, divided into five segments and incised with figures of stars and what has usually been thought of as a crescent moon.
Most archaeologists believe the stone, probably a fragment of a larger whole, was a star map or moon calendar but its exact purpose remains a mystery.
Kai Helge Wirth, a geographer and art scientist who has been researching the stone for some four years, believes he has cracked the mystery.
The stone, he says, was an ancient navigational tool, a map not only of the stars but of water currents in the Mediterranean.
Illuminated from the right angle, he suggests, the moon figure on the stone reveals itself to be not a moon at all but a boat: a ‘proto-Phoenician bird-bark’.
The stars are the constellations Scorpio, Virgo and Leo.
They correspond directly to the early Phoenician shipping routes.”
[Amazing story from the Times of Malta! That one ancient stone could carry information about various star patterns as well as ocean current tells us that ancient mariners were far more sophisticated than previously thought by mainstream archaeologists, though many are now considering the widespead ancient knowledge of astronomy with greater respect that they have done for more than 100 years.
We really recommend a visit to read the full story and see the clear image of this amazing stone artifact that has puzzled archareologists since it was first discovered – Ed]
“An artefact excavated from a shipwreck off the coast of Oman has been found to be the oldest known example of a type of navigational tool.
Marine archaeologists say the object is an astrolabe, an instrument once used by mariners to measure the altitude of the Sun during their voyages.
It is believed to date from between 1495 and 1500.
The item was recovered from a Portuguese explorer which sank during a storm in the Indian Ocean in 1503.
The boat was called the Esmeralda and was part of a fleet led by Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, the first person to sail directly from Europe to India.”
[An excellent story from BBC News! Astrolabes were efficiently accurate enough to allow mariners to navigate the seas, and this is another important discovery. Well worth a visit to the BBC site to see the images of the astrolabe and a video of the marine archaeologists at work – Ed]
“It turns out that nearly 1,000 years ago our ancestors were just as keen to share news about a solar eclipse, but in the absence of smartphones or computers they used more primitive means to depict the stunning solar event: rock art.
Researchers believe they have discovered a rock carving in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon that represents a total eclipse that occurred more than 900 years ago.
The engraving, known as a petroglyph, shows a circle with curved, intricate swirling emissions issuing from it.
Around the circle, believed to depict the sun, human figures can be seen in different positions and engaged in different activities.
University of Colorado Boulder Professor J. McKim Malville has said the circle shown in the rock art represents the sun’s outer atmosphere, known as its corona, with the tangled, looped protrusions on its edges dating it to a total eclipse that occurred in the region on July 11, 1097.”
[Well done Newsweek for highlighting this discovery! Eclipses were very important to ancient peoples all over the world, as they gave a glimpse of the corona and any major activity such as Cornonal Mass Ejections (CMEs) that may have been happening at the time of the eclipse. This story is well worth reading in full to understand the thinking behind the discoverers’ conclusions regarding exactly what this petroglyph represents – Ed]
“Ancient stone monuments may have been used for mysterious night-time ceremonies, archaeologists believe, after finding that some rock carvings only appear in moonlight.
Traditionally Neolithic structures were believed to align with the movements of the Sun, with the huge Wiltshire circle of Stonehenge lining up perfectly with the summer solstice.
But a new investigation of the Stone Age engraved panel Hendraburnick Quoit in Cornwall by Dr Andy Jones, found nearly 10 times the number of markings when viewed in moonlight or very low sunlight from the south east.
They also discovered that pieces of quartz had been deliberately smashed up around the site which would have glowed in the dark under moonlight, or firelight, creating a gentle luminescence.
Dr Jones, of the Cornwall Archaeological Unit said: ‘I think the new marks show that this site was used at night and it is likely that other megalithic sites were as well.'”
[WOW! What a revelation! That ancient megalithic sites were also used at night to view and study the moon’s movements, and that very precise surveying, complex mathematics and astronomical knowledge was incorporated with precision into many megalithic sites, has been known for more than 50 years with the excellent scientific studies of megalithic stone structures done by Oxford Uni Prof. Alexander Thom, revealed in his classic book, “Megalithic Lunar Observatories”.
The many campaigns to write Prof. Thom’s ground-breaking work out of the history of prehistoric astronomy is not so well known, but a full expose of this corrupt academic smear campaign run by the archaeological establishment can be found in the well-researched book by Robin Heath, “Alexander Thom: Cracking the Stone Age Code”
This Telegraph story is well worth reading in full for its important new insights, but also see the short video above on Hopewell Archaeoastronomy Lunar Alignments – Ed]
“Blackened and irregular, the prehistoric beads found in a centuries-old Illinois grave don’t look like anything special.
But the latest analysis1 shows that they were fashioned from an exotic material: the shards of a meteorite that fell to Earth more than 700 kilometres from where the beads were found.
The link between the Anoka meteorite, which landed in central Minnesota, and the Illinois beads confirms that ‘2,000 years ago, goods and ideas were moved hundreds of miles across eastern North America’, says Timothy McCoy, co-author of the analysis and curator-in-charge of meteorites at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC
The beads were made by people of the Hopewell culture, which flourished in the US Midwest from 100 BC to 400 AD – spreading from its epicentre in Ohio to as far as Mississippi.
The culture is known for sprawling ceremonial earthworks and for objects made of non-local materials such as mica.”
[Again we see that meteorites were held to be ‘sacred’ stones in yet another ancient culture. Most of these cultures have common themes throughout their religious and scientific beliefs, specifically a belief in Mother Earth and Father Sky. There are local differences but the common themes will go back much further to the times when meteorite bombardments from the sky destroyed their origin culture. This story is well worth reading in full – Ed]
April 09 2017, Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, USA
“Seen from the air, the structure is a D-shape, perched on the lip of a mesa that overlooks the famous “Cliff Palace” dwelling at Mesa Verde National Park.
Scientists call it the Sun Temple.
But what is it? An 800-year-old observatory? A ceremonial structure? A mix of both?
The only people who would know are the ancestral Puebloans — also known as the Anasazi — who built structures across the Southwest and then started abandoning them in the 13th century.
In a recent paper, an Arizona State University mathematician examined aerial imagery and concluded that the Sun Temple contains sophisticated geometric patterns, including Pythagorean triangles and other shapes used by other ancient civilizations.
The mathematician, Sherry Towers, also concluded that the Sun Temple’s builders had used a common unit of measurement — roughly 30 centimetres — in designing the site.”
[Another interesting story about ancient peoples use of sophisticated maths and geometry combined with astronomy! It only goes to show that when inter-disciplinary investigations review the archaeological records they find ancient peoples to have been far more sophisticated than previously thought by archaeologists and prehistorians – Ed]
“While excavating an ancient Roman villa buried in volcanic ash, 18th-century workers found an unusual lump of metal small enough to fit in a coffee mug.
Cleaning it revealed something both historically important and hilarious: one of the world’s oldest known examples of a portable sundial, which was made in the shape of an Italian ham.
Recently re-created through 3-D printing, a high-fidelity model of the sundial is helping researchers address questions about how it was used and the information it conveyed.
The model confirms, for instance, that using the whimsical timepiece required a certain amount of finesse, says Wesleyan University’s Christopher Parslow, a professor of classical studies and Roman archaeology who made the 3-D reconstruction.
All the same, ‘it does represent a knowledge of how the sun works, and it can be used to tell time.’
The vertical lines are marked for the months of the year. The horizontal lines indicate the number of hours past sunrise or before sunset.”
[A great story! It seems that ancident people’s could invent devices to tell the time of day, as well as devices and structures that record the solstices, equinoxes and lunar ectremes positions relative to Earth. Well done NatGeo – Ed]
“Italian archaeologists have found an intriguing Stonehenge-like ‘calendar rock’ in Sicily.
Featuring a 3.2-foot diameter hole, the rock formation marked the beginning of winter some 5,000 years ago.
Using a compass, cameras and a video camera mounted to a GPS-equipped drone, La Spina and colleagues carried out a test in December at the winter solstice.
The idea was to find out if the rising sun at solstice aligned with the distinct hole in the rock feature.
According to La Spina, the experiment was “a total success.”
‘At 7:32 am the sun shone brightly through the hole with an incredible precision’, La Spina said. ‘It was amazing.'”
[Some more interesting info about the Winer Solsice discovery in Sicily. Well worth a visit to read the full story and see the amazing image of the Winter Solstice sun shining right through the hole in the stone – Ed]
“A group of friends stumbled across an unusual arrangement of stones in Sicily, which experts have now confirmed form a prehistoric sundial dating back to the Bronze Age.
Their report was read by Professor Alberto Scuderi, a regional director of Italy’s Archaeologist Groups, who suggested the discovery get scientific confirmation.
The professor, who specializes in archeoastronomy, has been studying the find for three months, completing the work on Tuesday, January 3rd. Scuderi was due to present the full results of his analysis on Thursday at Gela’s Archaeological Museum.
But a professional verification carried out on December 21st – the winter solstice – confirmed that the sundial would have been used to determine the season and solstices.”
[Really great story from The Local in Italy! The Solstices were likely the most important of seasonal markers for both hunter-gatherers as well as early farmers, and this story underlines the importance of people who find ancient remains reporting them to the appropriate authoritites so they can be investigated and protected – Ed]
[In October 1900, Captain Dimitrious Kondos was leading a team of sponge divers near the the island of Antikythera off the coast of Greece. They noticed a shipwreck about 180 feet below the surface and began to investigate. Amongst the artifacts that they brought up was a coral-encrusted piece of metal that later archaeologists found was some sort of gear wheel.
The rest of the artifacts, along with the shape of the boat, suggested a date around 2000 years ago, which made the find one of the most anomalous that had ever been recovered from the Greek seas. It became known as The Antikythera Mechanism.
In 2006 the journal “Nature” published a letter, and another paper about the mechanism was published in 2008, detailing the findings of Prof. Mike G. Edmunds of Cardiff University. Using high-resolution X-ray tomography to study the fragments of the anomalous Antikythera Mechanism, they found that it was in fact a bronze mechanical analog computer that could be used to calculate the astronomical positions and various cycles of the Moon – as seen from the Earth: – Ed]
More Antikythera Mechanism Information & Commentary:
“The 2300 BC Event takes a new look at an old puzzle: what happened at this date to cause the various advanced societies on the Earth to simultaneously collapse?
Civilizations in Anatolia and Greece, through Egypt and the Middle East, and eastward to India and Central Asia were at their height. The collapse of these civilizations due to earthquakes and climatic changes has been mirrored by similar interruptions on all continents, in the Arctic, and extending to the Pacific.
The discontinuities have long puzzled archaeologists and historians. New religions and accompanying mythologies appeared at this time in all cultural regions describing bombardment and flooding from the skies.
Strangely, the dominant aspect of the mythologies, however, is the observation and worship of a ring appearing to surround the Earth, oriented to the two Ursa (Bear) constellations.”
“Some time around 2300 BC the Eath encountered a dense clustering of space debris, the early Southern & Northern Taurid meteoroid stream. The result was an intense fall of meteoroids, some of them sufficiently large to cause surface destruction.
Simultaneous with the meteoroid fall was a huge downpouring of water which caused flash flooding. Extensive destruction and loss of life resulted. An astonishing aspect of the event was the formation of a ring surrounding the Earth, reflecting sunlight during the day, hiding some stars at night, and moving around the sky through a 24-hour period.
Following the ‘main event’, there were crustal movements which shifted the location of water sources, and caused earthquakes which destroyed settlements. Abrupt severe climate changes occurred.”
“The Northern/Southern Taurid meteoroid stream is identified as the specific meteoroid stream that the Earth encountered at 2300 BC.
The Earth’s encounter with a dense cluster of large objects would produce atmospheric phenomena very different from the pleasant and interesting night displays of meteor trails that are within our own experience.
The rain of objects would have generated extraordinary visual and auditory effects combined with ground vibrations; and under extreme conditions would bring about severe surface destruction and loss of life.
The overall event was associated by the people with powerful deities and formed the basis for major religions. The mythologies and traditions are, in large part, the residues of those religions.”
