Ancient Astronomy Around the World - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 27

'dark constellations' [ 14 ] . They and the Quechua of Peru saw
the Emu as several dark constellations, including two llamas
being attacked by a fox.
Still more recently there's evidence of an advanced Amazon
culture, with towns of up to 60,000 people - wiped out so rapidly
by diseases from Europe that its towns, which were oriented to
the cardinal points on the horizon, were so quickly overgrown by
the jungle that few explorers ever got to see them [ 15 ]. There may
be big revelations in archaeoastronomy to come there: one of the
Amazonian dust constellations is the Rainbow Serpent, of whom
we will say more below.
The oldest known artistic materials, kits including an ochre-
rich mixture in abalone shells, were found in a cave on the South
African Cape Coast and dated to around 98,000 b.c. [ 16 ]. The old-
est known human art, on clay pieces more than 70,000 years old,
was also found in South Africa, at the Blombos Caves [ 17 ]. One of
the oldest known astronomical depictions is thought to be a carv-
ing of the Moon's phases, on an engraved bone plaque from the
Dordogne, around.27,000 b.c.; and the next oldest a similar tally
carved on a bone tusk at Gontzi, in the Ukraine, 15-10,000 b.c.
The most famous ancient paintings of all, at Lascaux in France
(c. 17,000 b.c.), are in a cave that is dome-shaped and illuminated
by the Sun only at summer solstice. Of 130 known caves of the
period decorated with paintings or carvings, only four are not
aligned with solstices or equinoxes, while the orientation of undec-
orated caves appears random. The Lascaux sequence matches the
zodiacal constellations with the Bull, a unicorn representing Cap-
ricornus and horses fitting Sagittarius [ 18 ]. The figure representing
Taurus appears to show the position of Aldebaran, between us and
the Hyades cluster, as it was in 15,300 b.c. due to the precession of
the equinoxes, while rows of dots below the horse and stag figures
may represent the lunar cycle [ 19 ]. The evidence for truly ancient
astronomy may be all around us, in both hemispheres, much of it
still unrecognized.
As far as we know, civilization emerged in the Middle East
around 10,000 years ago, around such sites as Jericho and Ebla.
Around 5000 b.c. a new culture emerged at the far end of the
Mediterranean, in southern Spain and northern Africa. Spread-
ing along the Mediterranean, its members created stone circles