![]() Unearthed just two decades ago in what is now eastern Germany, this 12-inch bronze circle is inlaid with gold strips in the shape of the Sun (or Full Moon), a crescent Moon, and various stars. For example, dating to roughly 1600 B.C., we have what is perhaps the first portrait of the universe: the Nebra Sky Disk. Traces of those early observers, of the way they interpreted the cosmos, have reached us in the form of tantalizing artifacts. “It is no exaggeration to say that astronomy has existed as an exact science for more than five millennia,” writes the late science historian John North. They got plenty wrong but the stargazers of old weren’t slouches, and by a few thousand years ago they’d become surprisingly sophisticated. Yet for tens of thousands of years, humans studied the heavens with just the naked eye and, eventually, crude instruments. Even if true, we frequently trace our cosmic perspective instead to Nicolaus Copernicus, who in 1543 set a steady course by proving that Earth revolves around the Sun to Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, who refined the heliocentric theory a generation later and to all their successors, who in just a few centuries (with the considerable advantage of telescopes and other advanced technology) have produced an astonishingly detailed map of the universe. Perhaps it is the eye-catching Pleiades, which Paleolithic hunter-gatherers would have seen vividly in the unpolluted sky.Ĭlaims of prehistoric astronomy are controversial. In the Lascaux caves of southwestern France, which are famously adorned with 17,000-year-old paintings, the artist’s subject is almost always a large animal.īut hovering above the image of one bull is an unexpected addition: a cluster of small black dots that some scholars interpret as stars.
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