My co-authored cave art paper has been receiving coverage for about two weeks:
BBC World Service:
Voice of America:
Science Alert:
https://www.sciencealert.com/ancient-art-pieces-show-how-humans-kept-time-40-000-years-ago
Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bridaineparnell/2018/11/28/cave-paintings-may-actually-be-sophisticated-star-maps/#3cc93f421751
The Australian:
Science Daily:
The Telegraph:
MSN:
The Times:
A good one, here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/early-human-cave-art
There’s probably others.
Most reports focus on cave art as constellations, which isn’t a novelty, except perhaps to the wider public. Science Alert, however, raised a keynote of the paper in our rejection of a purely shamanic reading – too often a dead-end answer to everything – in re-examining the outer vs inner world ambiguity in the mindset of cave artists:
If anything, these findings show we might need to move on from strictly shamanistic interpretations, to see art as integral to marking time based on a bold feature of the environment we often overlook in our modern world – the night sky.
Similarly, the Bradshaw Foundation picked up the thread regarding the importance of solstice and equinox markers (rather than the depiction of constellations for the sake of it) and the significance of Marshack’s deciphering of notches and artworks on bone plaques:
… keeping track of time and the changing seasons during the Ice Age by watching how stars slowly move in the sky as the year progresses is plausible, as revealed in Alexander Marshack’s publication ‘The Roots of Civilization’.
Centre stage, certainly in a graphic sense, was the Lascaux Shaft scene and the identity of the bison with Capricornus.
Although a relatively inconspicuous constellation, the image of a horned animal (stone-buck, ibex, ‘sea-goat’) has been assigned to Capricornus since ancient times and the constellation has possessed an exalted status in star mythologies. To Neoplatonic philosophers, it was the Gate of the Gods where souls ascended to heaven. In Greek mythology, it was identified as Aegocerus (‘goat-horn’) descended from Aegipan (‘goat-pan’). From these accounts, the reason Aegocerus was horned was because he fought together with Zeus against the Titans on Mount Ida. His weapon, which he found at the bottom of the ocean, was the shell-trumpet called Panicus (‘panic’) which caused the Titans to flee (Condos,1997). This explains the image of the sea-goat and the seashell pendant found at the bottom of the Shaft is a funny coincidence! However, the constellation was also identified as a goat-fish hybrid to the Babylonians. In his mass of star lore anecdotes, Hinkley-Allen (1899) suggests that Berossos was reported by Seneca to have learned from the old books of Sargon that the world would be destroyed by a great conflagration when all the planets met in this sign. Furthermore:
Jensen says that “the amphibious Ia Oannes of the Persian Gulf was connected with the constellation Capricornus; Sayce, that a cuneiform inscription designates it as the Father of Light – a title which, astronomically considered, could not have been correct except about 15000 years ago, when the sun was here at the summer solstice … So that, although we do not know when Capricornus came into the zodiac, we may be confident that it was millenniums ago, perhaps in prehistoric days (1899:139).
Capricornus occupied the summer solstice when Lascaux was in use and marked the maximum intensity of the Taurid shower, a far more eruptive spectacle at that time than it is today. Regardless of the reliability of reports of cosmic panics and conflagrations of Greek and Babylonian antiquity, the fact they were assigned to this constellation, and the latter identified as a horned beast at all, is intriguing. There are others too.
Despite their distance in history, the Shaft scene bears an analogous way of recording celestial information as the Tauroctony of Mithraic mysteries. This is the scene repeated on many cult reliefs depicting a man plunging a dagger into the neck of a bull; both man and bull are surrounded by an otherwise inscrutable iconography of people, symbolic animals and objects. Mithraic rituals were performed in grottoes or cave-imitating environments. Rather than star maps, both the Shaft scene and the Tauroctony, we suggest, use an ensemble of figures depicting different constellations which characterise their own respective solstice and equinox circumstances which together emphasize the events they record.
The history of the Tauroctony and the astronomy it encrypts has been proposed by David Ulansey in The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries (1989). The differences between the Roman cult and its Palaeolithic precedent is a big topic and largely anthropological e.g. nobody’s suggesting an unbroken line of cave-bull ritual. The Tauroctony, of course, was expressed in an esoteric symbology as an alternative to known writing-systems (nevertheless at a time when gods were still thought responsible for astronomical activity) whereas writing-systems at the time of Lascaux were still emerging from realistic, figurative and mythological impressions of the environment.
The ritual of the Lascaux Shaft represented a real event expressed (or even understood) as mythic. Probably performed at significant times of the year by persons in antler masks and animal costumes, the figures on the wall would have constituted a high religious mystery in their own day. Marshack suggests an aspect of what visitors to the Shaft, and elsewhere, would encounter:
Within this context we do not have to rely on such categories of story as “magic,” “animism,” or “totemism” to begin to understand the cognitive processes involved. Instead we can begin with an analysis of those basic psychological equations and strategies which use symbols and symbolic relations to indicate story and process and which always make the participant, artist, dancer, viewer, or dreamer a part of the story (1972:280).
Beyond theories about cavern archaeoacoustics, music archaeology currently lacks in the Lascaux record. It is yet tempting to think how appropriately a Palaeolithic drum would have manifested a bull-god, and its thunder, in a cave.