The meaning of the superb representations of animals painted on the walls of the caves of Altamira, Lascaux, Chauvet or even engraved in Göbekli Tepe, the oldest known temple in the world, remains very mysterious to us. Two researchers, who have carried out extensive investigative work, come to the conclusion that they represent constellations. And they add that our Upper Paleolithic ancestors practiced complex astronomy.
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Researchers Alistair Coombs from the University of Kent and Dr Martin Sweatman from the University of Edinburgh believe that they have succeeded in decoding the meaning of these works of art: “[it] is not simply representations of wild animals. Instead, animal symbols represent constellations in the night sky and are used to mark dates and events such as comets, ”they argue.
Animals, constellations, landmarks in time
An interpretation not entirely new because 10 years ago already, Chantal Jègues-Wolkiewiez deciphered the Hall of the Bulls within the sublime Grotte de Lascaux (see on this subject the film Lascaux, the sky of the first men) as a planetarium of the prehistory. In addition, according to the ethnoastronomer, the site was not chosen by chance, as well as many others that she examined afterwards. In their article published in the Athens Journal of History, the authors partly agree with it in the hypothesis that this practice had to do with the sky, the constellations, the seasons and that it was transmitted from generation to generation. And they even extend it to Europe, also adding that some works echoed cosmic events.
For their investigation, the researchers took care to compare the position of the stars - simulated with Stellarium and of course taking into account the precession of the equinoxes -, relative to the dating of known animal representations, encountered from Turkey to Germany. , passing through Spain and France, over a period stretching between 40.000 and 7.500 years. Either from the migrations of sapiens in Europe to the beginning of agriculture and sedentarization.
They conclude that the paintings of Chauvet (dating from around 36.000 years ago), Lascaux, Altamira or, much later, the representations discovered in the temples of Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük, both in present-day Turkey, have all the same meaning and testify to knowledge in astronomy much superior to what we imagined until now.
Not only did our Paleolithic ancestors have landmarks in time (the cycle of the seasons) but they were also aware of the precession of the equinox, and this long before the Greek scholar Hipparchus to whom we attribute the discovery of this phenomenon (the axis of rotation oscillates over a period of 25.900 years; it is for this reason, for example, that the pole star is not always the same over the centuries and that the solstices and equinoxes do not always occur within the same constellations of the zodiac ...).
The following (exciting): https://www.futura-sciences.com/science ... ons-74240/
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