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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The Out of Africa Migration Was Via Egypt and Not Ethiopia Says New Genetic Research

We have always thought that the most logical topographically-determined path for the "Out of Africa" sojourn of humanity was via Egypt and the Nile and then along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and beyond.

New genetic research, as reported by Joseph Dussault yesterday
at the Christian Science Monitor,
tell us that Early humans left Africa through Egypt.

Dussault discusses the results of a genetic study by Luca Pagani et al. in the American Journal of Human Genetics titled Tracing the Route of Modern Humans out of Africa by Using 225 Human Genome Sequences from Ethiopians and Egyptians.

That article is summarized at that open-access article CC BY-NC-ND as follows:

 "The predominantly African origin of all modern human populations is well established, but the route taken out of Africa is still unclear. Two alternative routes, via Egypt and Sinai or across the Bab el Mandeb strait into Arabia, have traditionally been proposed as feasible gateways in light of geographic, paleoclimatic, archaeological, and genetic evidence. Distinguishing among these alternatives has been difficult. We generated 225 whole-genome sequences (225 at 8× depth, of which 8 were increased to 30×; Illumina HiSeq 2000) from six modern Northeast African populations (100 Egyptians and five Ethiopian populations each represented by 25 individuals). West Eurasian components were masked out, and the remaining African haplotypes were compared with a panel of sub-Saharan African and non-African genomes. We showed that masked Northeast African haplotypes overall were more similar to non-African haplotypes and more frequently present outside Africa than were any sets of haplotypes derived from a West African population. Furthermore, the masked Egyptian haplotypes showed these properties more markedly than the masked Ethiopian haplotypes, pointing to Egypt as the more likely gateway in the exodus to the rest of the world. Using five Ethiopian and three Egyptian high-coverage masked genomes and the multiple sequentially Markovian coalescent (MSMC) approach, we estimated the genetic split times of Egyptians and Ethiopians from non-African populations at 55,000 and 65,000 years ago, respectively, whereas that of West Africans was estimated to be 75,000 years ago. Both the haplotype and MSMC analyses thus suggest a predominant northern route out of Africa via Egypt."