A ‘Lunar calendar’ found in the caves at Lascaux, France “may predate equivalent record-keeping systems by at least 10,000 years.” Hunter-gatherers from the ice age, it seems, had a primitive writing system which has now been uncovered by Ben Bacon, an amateur archaeologist, who concluded that the 20,000-year-old markings recorded the mating cycles of local animals.
Working with academic experts Bacon has published his research in a paper for the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0262407923000039?via%3Dihub).
Such special meaning in cave art symbols, however, has already been studied, and recently, as reported in Atlantis Rising Magazine. In 1996 at the Return to the Source conference at the University of Delaware, independent American researcher Frank Edge announced that he had identified certain celestial formations incorporated into cave drawings at Lascaux. Edge’s evidence including identification of the Pleiades and other stars in a series of black dots placed over the most prominent bull in the famed ‘Hall of the Bulls’ and was described by reporter Laura Lee in an article for Atlantis Rising in February of 1997. Then in 2000, the BBC also took notice of evidence for an ancient hidden language in the Lascaux designs, albeit without crediting the original discoverer.
Dr. David Whitehouse, BBC’s News Online science editor wrote at the time that “a prehistoric map of the night sky has been discovered on the walls of the famous painted caves at Lascaux in central France.” His story went on to describe the “map” thought to date back 16,500 years. Credited by the BBC with making the discovery, was Dr. Michael Rappenglueck, a German professor from the University of Munich, who argued that the map represented the three bright stars known as the summer triangle as well as the Pleiades. A similar pattern of stars was shown on a cave painting in Spain. The maps, said Rappenglueck show that our ancestors were more sophisticated than many believe, revealing that considerable scientific knowledge accompanied their legendary painting skill.
The significance of the art in the Lascaux caves may be greater than even the BBC suspects. More recent groundbreaking research on very ancient cave paintings in Lascaux and elsewhere, underscores the point that ancient people had a very advanced knowledge of astronomy.
A study produced in 2018 by researchers at the University of Edinburg, documents that artworks at sites across Europe, are not simply depictions of wild animals, as was previously supposed. Instead, analysis showed, the animal symbols represent star constellations in the night sky, and are used to represent dates and mark events such as comet strikes. 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. The findings suggest that long before the Greeks, ancient people understood a phenomenon known as the ‘precession of the equinoxes’. The ‘precession’ tracks in reverse order, the twelve 2150-year cycles, corresponding to the signs of the zodiac (i.e., the Age of Aquarius), also known as the “Great Year”.
The study was published in Athens Journal of History in 2018. “Early cave art shows,” said Dr Martin Sweatman, of the University of Edinburgh, and the lead author, “that people had advanced knowledge of the night sky within the last ice age. Intellectually, they were hardly any different to us today.”
AR #101
Neanderthal & Civilization
by Martin Ruggles
