A new study published by researchers at the University of Edinburgh suggests that prehistoric cave art in Europe is not simply depictions of wild animals. Rather, these animal symbols would represent constellations of stars in the night sky, and would have been used to represent dates and mark events such as cometary impacts.
The study indicates that perhaps as early as 40,000 years ago, humans recorded the passage of time using knowledge of how the position of stars slowly changes over thousands of years.
This would imply that prehistoric men understood the effect caused by the gradual change of the rotation axis of the Earth. Until now, the discovery of this phenomenon is attributed to the ancient Greeks.
Around the time Neanderthals became extinct, and perhaps before Homo sapiens became established in Western Europe, they could already define dates within a range of about 250 years, the study says. Also, that the astronomical knowledge of ancient peoples was much greater than previously believed, and that this knowledge could have helped in navigation in the open sea, which may change our understanding of prehistoric migrations.
To reach these conclusions, researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Kent studied details of Palaeolithic and Neolithic art in Turkey, Spain, France and Germany. They found that the same astronomy-based method of recording time is used at all sites, even though the examples studied are separated in time by tens of thousands of years.
They also indicate that some stone carvings found in Gobekli Tepe (Turkey) can be interpreted as a memorial of the impact of a comet around the year 11,000 BC. This impact would have started a small ice age, known as the Younger Dryas (there are indications of the impact of the Clovis comet about 12,900 years ago in North America) at the end of the Pleistocene.
Thus, what is considered the best-known prehistoric work of art, the Lascaux Well Scene in France, which depicts a dying man and various animals, could commemorate another cometary impact around 15,200 BC
The team of researchers compared the age of many of these cave paintings with the positions of stars in prehistoric times through software simulation.
According to Dr. Martin Sweatman, who led the study, early rock art shows that people had advanced knowledge of the night sky in the last ice age. Intellectually, he wasn't too different from us. These findings support the theory of multiple cometary impacts during human development, and will likely revolutionize the way prehistoric populations are viewed.
The study Decoding European Palaeolithic Art:Extremely Ancient knowledge of Precession of the Equinoxes was published in the Athens Journal of History.