I recently co-authored a paper with Martin Sweatman from the School of Engineering, University of Edinburgh, titled: Decoding European Palaeolithic art: Extremely ancient knowledge of precession of the equinoxes. It is currently under peer-review but can be downloaded here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.00046 and here: https://scirate.com/arxiv/1806.00046
The background assumption is that civilisations developed through hunter-gather rituals tied to the annually changing sky and landscape – major ceremonies connected with solstice and equinox observations. There is a correlation between the radiocarbon dates of symbolic animal forms in Palaeolithic cave art, and in Neolithic shrine/sacred space examples, with the listed solstice-equinox positions. The animal forms encode dates against a celestial co-ordinate system or “zodiac”. This archaic zodiac (Greek: zodiakos ‘animals’) does not reference the twelve, or more, roughly symmetrical star signs of Mesopotamian antiquity. It instead traces the origin of that system from fewer asterisms that were used for tracking the sun’s course over a year. The existence of this zodiac does not imply cultural continuity from Ice Age Europe to the Neolithic Near East. It doesn’t rule this out but rather identifies a method of calibrating time, recording events and the use of symbolic animal forms in organising the cosmos.
Similarly, awareness of the precession of the equinoxes does not imply that early starwatchers would necessarily be aware of the larger, approximately 26,000-year cycle involved. The gradual change produced by this phenomenon would be noticeable over vastly shorter periods of time. This would not require advanced equipment. Regular monitoring by megaliths, posts, trees, cave entrances, and ‘a belief in the veracity of your ancestors’, would suffice.
Autumn solstice sunset Karahunj, Armenia (image, AC)
Solstice periods have been recognised as major events in hunter-gatherer calendars. Complex hunter-gatherer groups from the Upper Palaeolithic most likely developed secret societies who possessed esoterica (powerful animal symbols, artefacts, stories and mythologies) based on astronomical monitoring (Hayden & Villenueve, 2011). As calendar keepers, these groups would schedule feasts, ceremonies and initiations at significant times of the year. For an Andean example of solstices marking important events, see https://phys.org/news/2018-07-feasting-rituals-cooperation-require-crucial.html.
I do not personally follow my colleague on the Altamira and Chauvet examples, neither on specific details from Göbekli Tepe. However, archaeology generally neglects the sky as a cultural resource.
Understandings of Palaeolithic cave art are very broad, there is no unitary paradigm which explains it. The readings of different theoretical schools reflect trends of their own age. Since its discovery in Europe in the mid-19th century, cave art was seen as primitive hunting magic – displays of fauna hunters ideally wished to kill for food. What was depicted was expected to happen in reality by means of a rite.
Imagined hunting magic ceremony by Abbé Breuil (after E. Hadingham, Secrets of the Ice Age)
Some saw it as fertility magic, while others compared it with the art of children (Sandars,1995). In the 1960s, the French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan devised a more abstract theory that suggested painted imagery in caves followed a binary structure such as light or dark, closed or open, male or female (Leroi-Gourhan, 1982). Followingly, many of the geometric signs seen in caves which accompany more realistic animal depictions, became male or female fertility symbols depending on their linear (“phallic”) or triangular (“vulva”) appearance. This theory remained popular for some time but eventually went out of academic fashion. Others since have seen animal footprints in these symbols and suggest these signs were indexical, to serve as a database of game animals that might have been taught to younger members of the group (Mithen, 1998).
A departure from the above puts cave art in a shamanic context. Here, paintings and symbols are understood as spirit-animals and entopic forms generated in altered states of consciousness. The natural walls of a cave’s interior are “membranes” uniting worlds of the living and the dead; painted spirit-animals and human-animal hybrids extrude from the ancestral realm behind the wall (Lewis-Williams, 2012). Another view suggests that cave art was placed acoustically in specific fissure locations, that drawings represent the sounds people produced in those spots. This perspective, which converges symbolic thinking with visual experience, sees cave art as a form of graphic communication.
Falling horse “vortex” characteristic of constellation depictions. Lascaux (image, AC)
A lot of these theories are the natural result of approaching an art form that does not have a recognized writing-system or archived narrative. Incidentally, the idea that cave art might represent Stone Age myth and storytelling has not formed a school of interpretation. This is possibly due to deeply entrenched preconceptions about the incentives and cultural ability of Palaeolithic people.
In Images of the Ice Age (2016), Paul Bahn defines as ‘bizarre’ various astronomical readings of cave art. He thinks this due to generations reinventing evidence in its own image, that interest in astronomy reflects the current Space Age. Strangely enough, however, astronomical interpretations have been there from early on, they just never became part the mainstream trend. Bahn also chooses to separate star positions from seasons, a correlation which plays a large part in some of the theories he dismisses.
From the 1970s a new direction was created by the American science writer Alexander Marshack. Sceptical about the anthropological theories of his day, Marshack believed that prehistoric people explained the workings of the world in story, image and symbol, and that these artistic expressions embodied an early form of science (Marshack, 1972). Marshack’s work didn’t focus on cave paintings but a large accumulation of Upper Palaeolithic plaques and figurines. He proposed that notches and lines incised into them were notation systems that recorded time, lunar phases, and seasonal information. Unlike anyone before, Marshack framed cave art as a symbolic storage system, or “script”, of information. His approach created a lasting influence which has reinforced over the past 40 years the reappraisal of the cultural skills of Palaeolithic people. He also opened the door to interpretations which see painted cave beasts and symbols corresponding with figures from a mythology in which astronomical observation and mythical thought mixed.
A summer bison and winter bison interlocked and appearing to burst from the wall at the termination of the Nave, Lascaux (image, AC)
The paintings of Lascaux have been subject to the range of rock art theories since the discovery of the grotto complex in 1940. Initial excavators of the site such as Henri Breuil had entertained the possibility that painted animals represent constellations. The 1990s, however, witnessed a surge of scholarly interest in deciphering Lascaux’s “sky maps”. In 1992 the Spanish prehistorian Luz Antequera Congregado published her doctoral thesis on the cultural evolution of the constellations. This included an analysis of the seven dots (two dots are merged) above the shoulder of the famous aurochs painting in Lascaux’s Hall of the Bulls which appears to mimic the position of the Pleiades cluster relative to the Taurus constellation. She also examined other figures from earlier cave art (Congregado, 1992).
In 1997 an American mathematician named Frank Edge suggested the Hall of the Bulls cave entrance depicted the summer sky, largely due to the representation of Taurus-Pleiades (Edge, 1997). Many others have found the proposed Ice Age depiction of Taurus-Pleiades compelling. The French archaeologist, Chantal Jeguès-Wolkiewiez suggested the Hall of the Bulls was a prehistoric zodiac, she argued the star Antares (of the Scorpius constellation) was shown in an aurochs portrait opposite the depiction of Taurus. Her research also demonstrated that Lascaux, and many other Palaeolithic cave sites, were meaningfully chosen because the sun shone into their entrances over solstice periods in a manner similar to Neolithic monumental environments (Jegues-Wolkiewiez, 2000). Indeed, out of 130 Palaeolithic caves she visited, she found that 122 aligned to the solstices or equinoxes, an extremely strong result (Jegues-Wolkiewiez, 2007).
