Dr. Philip Stooke sat in a dark office. It was long past working hours. However, he couldn’t tear himself away from the photo he was studying. It was a stone from one of the most remarkable Neolithic sites in the British Isles. Something was engraved on it that would have to rewrite the history of science.
The moon is abundantly represented in carvings and paintings across historical eras. It is symbolized by either a circle or a crescent. In medieval Europe and in the Renaissance, it is additionally decorated with a human face. However, no one immortalized him in his real form for a long time.
“It has puzzled me for several years that there is no recorded map of this natural satellite older than about 500 years. The one by Leonardo da Vinci from 1505 is considered to be among the first. But before it, as if there was a dark age,” says an astronomer from the University of Western Ontario in Canada.
He therefore decided to study old manuscripts, chronicles, but also records from excavations of prehistoric sites in the United Kingdom.
He was about to give up when luck smiled on him. He came across an image of an engraved stone found on a Neolithic tomb in Knowth, Ireland. At first glance he didn’t look interesting at all, but when Stooke focused on him, he saw a clear logic in him.
Map of the Moon
“I was amazed. I was looking at ordinary arches. But if you place these marks on a photo of the full moon, you’ll see that they line up with its terrain. It was undoubtedly a map of our closest orbit. The oldest ever found.”
Sorry, but the embedded content is no longer available.
The astronomer was even able to read what they were referring to. They are said to lead from the circular lunar sea called Mare Humorum with a diameter of 380 km to Mare Crisium extending on the far side of the Moon.
“The people who made the plan were the first scientists to study the sky,” warns the expert. “They were not at all primitive as we generally imagine.”
According to the astronomer, they not only knew advanced mathematics, but also had to be able to work with angles and scales. At the same time, concepts such as the change of seasons and the movement of the planets were common to them.
The prehistoric site of Knowth is estimated to be over five thousand years old. It includes a large passage tomb surrounded by 17 smaller ones. All of them consist of over 200 decorated stones, containing spirals and rhombuses.
Clever ones from prehistoric times
“These are often considered merely decorative or at most abstract, the original meaning of which has long since been lost. But what if everything is different?” asks Stooke. “Could ancient ancestors have recorded through them the terrain of our natural satellite or planets that was visible to the naked eye?”
Source: Youtube
This idea is supported by research on a cairn called Cairn T at Loughcrew. Archaeologist Martin Brennan noticed on March 17, 1980, that the beam of the rising Sun illuminates the same stone as the brightness of the rising Moon.
So it is likely that Knowth could have had a connection with both celestial bodies, and our closest companion was considered equally important. “If the moonlight reached one of the stones by the eastern passage, it would illuminate the map as well,” says Philip Stooke. “It is not a coincidence.”
Resources: www.ancientpages.com, www.knowth.com, www.news.bbc.co.uk
2024-02-07 11:33:15
#Touch #5000yearold #map #Moon #shocked #scientists #idea #prehistoric #times #created
