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Aboriginal Sundial Pre-Dates Stonehenge
brindafella writes "Look out, Stonehenge, here come the Wurdi Youang rocks in the Australian state of Victoria. The semi-circle of stones has been examined by an astrophysicist from Australia's premier research group, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), who says this arrangement of rocks is a carefully aligned solar observatory that may be 10,000 years old. It would have been created by local Aborigines, the Wathaurong people, who have occupied the area for some 25,000 years."
For those of you who would actually read TFA if it were available:
N258: Wurdi Youang: An Australian Aboriginal Stone Circle with possible solar indications.
Ray P. Norris, Priscilla M. Norris, Duane W. Hamacher, and John Morieson , 2010, To be submitted to Archaeoastronomy Journal
From the Authors webpage:
http://www.atnf.csiro.au/people/rnorris/
There are older stone circles in the UK than Stonehenge. The stone circles in Orkney predate Stonehenge for example, though admittedly not by as much as those claimed here.
Linky here
Try 75,000 years old, in Africa.
http://www.adamscalendar.com/pages/michael-tellinger.php
Well, the guy might be a bit of a loon. Apparently he believes in little green men in flying saucers too, but the stone circle is apparently real.
Don't the precessions influence the relative position of the sun and Earth in a way that would be significant after 10k years, meaning that something on Earth aligned with a specific Sun position at a specific time of the year now would not be valid 10k years ago, and conversely?
Yes, but that only changes the positions relative to the stars. Precession means the rotation axis of the earth changes the way it points, but the axis is the same. North is always the same direction, apart from a relatively small polar motion.