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Sunday, December 23, 2018

Ancient Cave Paintings Are Astronomy is the Latest News from the University of Edinburgh

The latest news from the University of Edinburgh headlines that
Cave paintings reveal use of complex astronomy, reporting that:

"Some of the world’s oldest cave paintings have revealed how ancient people had relatively advanced knowledge of astronomy.

The artworks, at sites across Europe, are not simply depictions of wild animals, as was previously thought.

Instead, the animal symbols represent star constellations in the night sky, and are used to represent dates and mark events such as comet strikes, analysis suggests.

They reveal that, perhaps as far back as 40,000 years ago, humans kept track of time using knowledge of how the position of the stars slowly changes over thousands of years.
"
For the last 30 years we have been writing books and articles explaining that ancient rock art, cave paintings and megalithic sites, including carvings and markings on the megaliths themselves, represent "complex" ancient astronomy. See e.g. http://www.megaliths.net/

We are very happy to see that other researchers are now increasingly drawing similar conclusions to those we have been publishing for decades.

Hat tips to StonePages Archaeo News

and to EurekaAlert.org at
Prehistoric cave art reveals ancient use of complex astronomy

Just keep those congratulatory cards and letters coming ....

As we have written for decades, much of Ancient Egypt was also focused on astronomy.

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