Ancient Astronomy Around the World - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 26

hunter-gatherer, nomadic and early agricultural phases of society,
awareness of the movements of the Sun and the Moon has been
essential. Pace Aubrey Burl (see Chap. 1 ), there has never been “a
time when there were no months or weeks,” and probably we have
been embroidering on that awareness, in storytelling and in art, for
a very long time indeed.
Some of the oldest records of this may survive in Australia.
Very recently, the possible remains of an astronomically aligned
stone circle have been found at Mount Rothwell, 50 miles from
Melbourne, dating from around 8000 b.c. - contemporary with
the first human settlement in Britain after the last Ice Age. But
humans have been on the continent for at least 30,000 years -
some say 60,000-76,000 [ 7 ] - and although claims for 176,000 years
failed to stand up, there was settlement of Flores in Indonesia by
hominids 700,000 years ago or more, proving the ability to make
short sea crossings [ 8 ] . There's growing recognition that some leg-
ends of 'the Dreamtime,' before the coming of white explorers,
have a basis in fact - for example, stories in northeastern Australia
of 'a great white wave' may relate to a mega-tsunami caused by
a meteorite impact off New Zealand in the fifteenth century [ 9 ].
For a long while, it's been noted that the Aboriginal name for the
Henbury meteorite craters, formed around 2700 b.c., translates as
“sun trail fire devil stone” [ 10 ] .
In recent years increasing attention has been paid to the
star lore of the Aborigines, including 'dark constellations' -
dark nebulae of dust and gas, silhouetted against the brightest
regions of the Milky Way, which Aboriginal legends portrayed
as the Emu, the totemic emblem of many tribes [ 11 ] . Binyu, the
Ringtail Possum, featured as the head of the Southern Cross,
while the Coalsack Nebula behind it was a dungeon into which
he hurled his wife's seducer [ 12 ] . Eta Carinae, nearby, domi-
nated the constellation of Cullowgillouric War, the wife of War,
the Crow; Sirius was the brightest star in Warepil, the Wedge-
tail Eagle; Achernar the brightest in Yerredetkurrk the Fairy
Owl; and the Magellanic Clouds were Kourtchin, 'the Brolgas'
[ 13 ] . It's suggested that these constellations may correspond to
figures in rock paintings dating back to 40,000 b.c., and if so,
they may be the oldest known portrayals of the sky. The South
African bushmen and tribes in the Amazon basin have similar