Where would we find the oldest known drawings of constellations?

Answer 1

Lascaux, France, 17,000 years ago Frank Edge's discovery began as a moment of pattern recognition, and it would take an astronomer's familiarity with the constellations to see it. Edge was just gazing at photos of the famed cave paintings at Lascaux, France, when he quickly identified the Pleiades in a series of six dots over the shoulder of the most prominent bull. He kept looking at the six figures, four of them bulls, that make up the Hall of Bulls mural. The more he looked, the more representations of stars he began to see in the outline of those figures. Now that he's sorted it all out, he can tell you that what he saw were new constellations, arbitrary groupings of stars, that are bigger than those we know today. The body of that dominant bull incorporates the constellation Taurus, of which the Pleiades is a part. In the next bull, he found Orion and Gemini, and in the next Leo, with portions of Virgo. In the next figure, a horse's head is the feet of Virgo, and at the far end of the mural, a curious unicorn is made up of Scorpius, Sagitarrius and Libra. All the dots are in the right place, with appropriate shapes says Edge. With the Pleiades, we have it easy, with dots matching dots. All the rest are what you get when you connect dots into pictures. It was time to turn to the computer for verification. Using Sky Globe, Edge went backwards in time to the date archeologists assign the cave paintings, based on cave floor pollen samples. And there the computer-generated pictures of the positions of the stars showed those very same constellations, all neatly lined up on the horizon on the summer solstice of 15,000 B.C., 17,000 years ago. He had confirmed the painting's date.