Primitive Rock Paintings and Starry World: A New Interpretation of Stone Age Art by British Scientists

According to the report of the British magazine Focus on June 20 19, Dr. Martin Weightman, a chemical engineering scientist at Edinburgh University, and Alistair Combs, a religious researcher at Kent University, pointed out in their paper entitled "Decoding Paleolithic Art in Europe: Ancient People's Understanding of the Vernal Equinox and Precession" that the oldest rock paintings in the world, such as Lascaux rock paintings in France, may reveal to us how ancient people used quite complicated astronomical knowledge.

People, birds and bison in Lascaux, France, are thought to have some connection with the starry sky. Image: pinterest

Before that, sweetman had been involved in the study of history and art, and he was particularly interested in prehistoric history. One example is the book Decoding Prehistory: Scientific Exploration of Integrating Astronomy, Geochemistry and Archaeology, published on 20 18, which involves the site of Gobekli (G? Bekli Tepe), the tooth carving of the Sphinx found in the Horenstein-Stadell Cave in Harrens more than 40,000 years ago, and the Sphinx in the Egyptian Pyramid of Giza.

The lion's tooth carving found in Dunstad Cave in hellens, southern Germany. Photo source: Inquisition.

Sweetman's conclusion about primitive rock paintings is quite different from the popular understanding before, because people usually guess that the images on the rock walls are vivid descriptions of their hunting objects, that is, various animals or hunting scenes depicted by primitive people. For example, the cave paintings of Lascaux, France, have been regarded as the reappearance of animal images since they were discovered in the1860s. Later, researchers thought that this was a witchcraft expression about primitive hunting, and the hunter painted an animal image, hoping that he could hunt this animal in reality. Of course, some people think that cave rock paintings are the product of art for art's sake. In short, there are many understandings about it.

In sweetman's view, animals in cave paintings may only represent the stars in the night sky, and are used to mark important events such as dates and comet impacts. About 40 thousand years ago, the ancients began to use the knowledge of how the position of stars changed slowly to record time. They realized the influence of the gradual rotation of the earth's rotation axis, which is the so-called discovery of precession. In the past, historians attributed this to Hipparchus in ancient Greece. However, the ancient people's insight into the astronomical phenomena far exceeded our usual guess and imagination.

Descendants' description of hipparchus' working state: pictures from scientific sources

Researchers have studied animal images in Paleolithic and Neolithic art sites all over Germany, Spain and France, including Harens-stoddard Cave in southern Germany, Chauvet Cave and altamira Cave in northern Spain and Lascaux Cave in southern France. They found that these sites were dated according to complete astronomical knowledge, and the methods were quite consistent, but in fact, the rock paintings in different caves were more than 10 thousand years apart. Surprisingly, the content of websites in different places is surprisingly consistent. For example, some of the contents in the rock paintings in the depths of Lascaux Cave are similar in meaning to the No.43 stone pillar (Eagle Stone) in the site of Gobekli, because both of them have records of meteor disasters. The former occurred in about 15 150 BC (with an error of about 200 years), and the latter occurred in about 10950 BC (with an error of about 250 years).

Comparison between the constellation around Pillar 43 and Scorpio: Illustration of sweetman and Combs' paper.

If rock paintings are actually quite complicated star maps, then our previous understanding of rock paintings is very problematic. Sweetman pointed out: "The early cave art showed that in the last ice age, people had a deep understanding of the night sky. Intellectually, they are almost no different from us today. These findings support the theory of many comet impacts in the process of human development and may completely change the way we look at prehistoric humans. " Moreover, if prehistoric people have superb astronomical knowledge, it means that they can get directions when sailing at sea and finally complete the great migration.

Mural in the cave of Milla in Arda, Spain, in which the bull is considered to correspond to the "Summer Triangle".

Schematic diagram of the "summer triangle" composed of three bright stars: cosmic purchase.

In fact, this is not the first time that researchers have revealed that primitive art may be related to astronomy. The site of Gobekli in present-day Turkey was excavated by Klaus Schmidt of the German Institute of Archaeology in 1994. The site spans from 9 130 BC to 7560 BC, which is 7000 years earlier than the pyramids in Egypt. This is the earliest large Stonehenge discovered so far. People found traces of the event that a comet hit the earth in BC 1 1000 on stone carvings. Indeed, since1990s, more and more scholars have regarded the cave art of the Paleolithic as a kind of star map. There is a doctoral thesis devoted to the study of stars corresponding to "points" in animal images. For example, the three bulls in Alta Milla Cave represent the summer triangle stars-Tianjin IV (the first bright star in Cygnus), Vega and Altair. Similarly, the eyes of people, bison and birds in Lascaux Cave correspond to the position of the summer triangle star. Some scholars even think that the Cow Hall in Lascaux Cave is a prehistoric zodiac. ...

Obviously, primitive cave paintings are a fascinating world, which may hide more mysteries unknown to modern people.

(The author is a professor at Peking University Art Institute)