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

Arrogant Archaeologists

[Katravax]

Archaeologists and historians in general piss me off with their clueless arrogance. Here's a quote from the story:

Some feel the neolithic people lacked the sophistication to memorialize the eclipse in this way.

Do they think that only in recent history have humans become intelligent? Our brain today is the same as theirs. They were just as "sophisticated" as we are. Every time the archaeologists find something new, there are plenty of quotes about how surprised they are at the intricacy of something, or the design of something else. If you believe the archaeologists, nothing mattered to our ancestors but their kitchen utensils and their paintings.

The people in the story were only around 5000 years ago. We haven't changed that much... We see the amazing art and design in Europe from a few centuries ago, lots of long-lasting writing in the Middle East a couple thousand years ago, pyramids and beautiful work from who knows when in Egypt, and we're supposed to think that somehow 5000 years ago in Ireland they were illiterate cave monkeys?

How have archaeologists gotten so arrogant?

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.

Re:Arrogant Archaeologists

[SIGFPE]

It's not a claim that these people were unintelligent. But techniques like representative art are a learnt skill. All through life we discover things that seem obvious after the fact but aren't so obvious a priori. Representative art is one of these. Even recognising art as a representation of something is a learnt skill.

Humans are more than just their physical bodies - they are the products of a culture and those cultures have changed dramatically over 5000 years.

BTW There's every reason to believe that these people were illiterate if not exactly monkeys. Just because some people in Sumeria or Egypt had got the hang of writing it doesn't mean that the Irish did too.

My own misinterpretation of the drawing

[Katravax]

I know the story is being run on April Fool's day, and that makes me a fool for treating it as real, but the story on astronomy.com was posted March 28, so I'll bite.

Does anyone else think these "archaeoastronomers" are full of it? Does anyone else see a sketch of an eclipse here? Their explanation completely ignores the rest of the wall. I would think that someone looking for astronomical explanations of these diagrams on this cave wall would have noticed the following:

Of the two overlapping ringed circles: The "big circle" has a center with nine rings around it. Sort of like the orbits of the planets, maybe? The slightly smaller circle (the center of which crosses what would be Jupiter's orbit) has more rings around it... rings similar to moon orbits around Jupiter. Don't look at it as two circles colliding in 2D, look at it as a blow-up of Jupiter and it's moons.

The other shapes on the wall also resemble orbits... 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? The picture accompanying the article is so small, and even the "larger view" is pretty low-res. Specifically, the third circle on the right (with a center and three rings), the one to the immediate left of the vertical rings/diamonds on the far right... those little white dots look like several satellites orbiting something.

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". It's also obvious they're just making wild guesses, so I can too.

Technology gone wrong

[leonbrooks]

the charred remains of 48 people found nearby that were the result of a panicked attempt to appease the sun gods.

Really, it was a crowd of supporters for one of Dr Gerard K O'Niell's forerunners. They gathered to watch their antenna array light up with microwaves converted and retransmitted from their moon-based solar power station, and the beam arrived a lot more focussed than it should have been and also slightly off target... (-:

Speaking of technology gone wrong, hasn't the absence of AC posts made today's stories a lot shorter? Or is this the (H)GSB we kept hearing about? Or both.