Oldest-known Solar Eclipse Recorded in Stone

XorNand writes: "Astronomy.com is reporting that a scientist, using astronomy simulation software, has correlated ancient stone carvings in Ireland to a solar eclipse that occurred on November 30, 3340 BC. Also interesting are the other pieces of evidence in the area, including the charred remains of 48 people found nearby that were the result of a panicked attempt to appease the sun gods."

Comments

Re:My own misinterpretation of the drawing

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone count the number of object orbiting the other objects? Do they line up to numbers of moons around planets in our solar system?

I can assure you that only 5 planets + the Earth + the Sun + the Moon can be known to these people. The rest can't be seen with the naked eye, you need a telescope to see the rest (except possibly Uranus in good conditions if you know where to look). So if the number of lines on the drawings correspond to the number of planets/moons in the solar system, then the whole thing must be a prank.

I'm not saying I'm any more correct than the "archaeoastronomers" are, but if you've got astronomy on the brain looking at that cave drawing, I don't see how you get "eclipse".

Well at least their idea cannot be dismissed as easily as yours.

Re:Arrogant Archaeologists

[Psion]

The litany of development you recite is the exact reason these archaeologists are surprised. The more recent achievements built upon earlier accomplishments. Unless you subscribe to some of Erich van Daniken's ideas, the overall sophistication of artistic and scientific accomplishments of more primative cultures gets...well, even more primative the further back you look. By the time your poking around 5000 years ago any sophisticated understanding of the world around our ancestors is quite rare.

To some degree, I share a bit of your incredulity. A few thousand years shouldn't be enough to have the profound impact on our culture and knowledge that it obviously has. Biologically, we don't appear to be any different from our forebears from 35,000 years ago -- and yet we fail to find any evidence that the human condition, culturally speaking doesn't begin to change until quite recently.

This isn't arrogance on the part of the archaeologists, it's a simple understanding that has built up over decades of careful research and excavation. And generally, people living 5000 years ago evidenced very little understanding of the world around them. That isn't saying that they couldn't, but they didn't exactly have the benefit of a guaranteed public education to give them a leg up. And transportation options, beyond one foot in front of the other, were a bit limited too, so there wasn't much opportunity to share accumulated wisdom with other tribes that weren't nearby.

It's beginning to look like there's a certain population density that needs to be reached in a region before people start to have the time to do anything more than sketch in the dirt. Infrastructure, however primative, has to be in place to allow some people to hunt for a living, and others to think and create. And once you have the ability for a large group of people to take time off from basic survival needs -- culture, at least the kind that goes beyond pictures of animals carved into cave walls, begins to rapidly blossum.