[meteorite-list] 8000BC Big Dipper Petroglyph

[lebofsky at lpl.arizona.edu]

Hi Robert:

I took "Starry Night," a planetarium program "back" about 8,000 years
(6,000 BC) and, as I would have predicted, the 7 stars in the Big Dipper
are not far off from what we see today. You would have to go back many 10s
of thousands of years in order to see a big diffence. I remember seeing
predictions of the dipper being more of a pan cake flipper in 100,000 and
that 100,000 years ago, the bowl was much deeper and I think the handle
flatter. I have not gone that far with the program (there might be a
preset demo of it in the program, but it is late and have not looked for
it).

Larry

> Hello Ed, Martin, Cris, List,
>
> There has been some discussion on meteorite-list about Chinese researcher
> Wu Jiacai, who recently announced the finding of groups of petroglyphs in
> Inner Mongolia. In his interpretation, the petroglyphs show that an
> intellectually advanced ethnic group, the Chifeng people of the Hongshan
> Culture, were forced to leave their homeland because of a singular
> destructive event, perhaps comet- or meteorite-related.
> http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/673451/Falling-meteor-depicted-in-5000-year-old-rock-carving-in-north-China.aspx
>
> While looking into this event, I came across reports of an earlier find by
> Wu Jiacai, an early Neolithic depiction of the Big Dipper. See for example
> http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146412586
>
> It made the news in Chinese papers. Here is a summary of a 2010 interview
> with Wu Jiacai in a Mongolian home town newspaper.
> http://www.swcf.cn/wh/2010-01/12/content_900.htm  The newspaper article
> features a superimposed diagram of the shape of the Big Dipper in 8000BC.
> Maybe some of the astronomers here can assess whether this shape is
> plausible.
>
> -------------
> Summary
>
> After more than a year of on-site research at Baimiaozi Mt., Wu had
> identified ten distinct groups of rock art, mostly depicting animals and
> people. Among them was a 310 cm-long yam-shaped stone on which 19 clearly
> visible stars had been chiseled and ground into the stone's upward-facing
> side, with the markings depicting the seven stars of the Big Dipper on the
> northern part of the face.
>
> [A better view of the stone, from Wu Jiacai's personal blog, is here
> https://www.dropbox.com/gallery/18663629/1/Hongshan%20Culture?h=bdfa66  ]
>
> The total length of the Big Dipper is 119cm. The indentations marking the
> stars are 6cm in diameter, with a maximum depth of 5 cm. The shape of each
> star resembles an upside-down mantou (steamed bread), wide on the outside
> and smaller within. The star-shapes are smooth, with rounded surface
> [indentations] that also contain a natural-colored residue of dust and
> body oil [from touching].
>
> Following astronomers' reconstructions of star positions from 100,000
> years ago to today, Wu Jiacai found complete matches between the
> configuration of the Big Dipper's seven stars 10,000 years ago and the
> configuration of stars in the rock art.
>
> Gai Shanlin [a Manchu from Hebei], who is the regional archaeological
> expert on rock art, inspected the inscribing-polishing methods. He
> recognized the drawing of the seven stars of the Big Dipper as an early
> Neolithic artifact by ancestral people.
>
> End Summary
>
> ------------
>
> Regards
>
> Robert A. Juhl, Tokyo
>
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