A study indicates ancient people had a wealth of knowledge about the stars and recorded it in cave art as long ago as 40,000 years.

https://earthsky.org/human-world/prehistoric-cave-art-suggests-ancient-use-complex-astronomy?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=229dcdbf28-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-229dcdbf28-394005577

A new study says that some of the world’s oldest cave paintings reveal that ancient people had relatively advanced knowledge of astronomy. According the new analysis, some of the paintings are not simply depictions of wild animals, as was previously thought. Instead, the animal symbols represent star constellations in the night sky, and are used to represent dates and mark events such as comet strikes. 

Researchers from the Universities of Edinburgh and Kent studied details of Paleolithic and Neolithic art featuring animal symbols at sites in Turkey, Spain, France and Germany. They found all the sites used the same method of date-keeping based on sophisticated astronomy, even though the art was separated in time by tens of thousands of years. The team confirmed their findings by comparing the age of many examples of cave art – known from chemically dating the paints used – with the positions of stars in ancient times as predicted by sophisticated software.

According to the study, published November 2, 2018, in the Athens Journal of History, the cave paintings suggest that, perhaps as far back as 40,000 years ago, humans kept track of time using knowledge of how the position of the stars slowly changes over thousands of years.