Numerous historical and archaeological finds indicate that our distant ancestors regularly observed the sky. But actually, why did they need it? Indeed, in those days, people still could not build spaceships and plan flights to other planets. But perhaps they had completely different, rather "mundane" goals?
Stone round dances
Take, for example, Stonehenge - the legendary Hanging Stones, or the Round Dance of the Giants. This is the most famous of the monuments of the prehistoric era, not only in the British Isles, but also in the entire north-west of Europe, since the early Middle Ages, it has excited the imagination and aroused theories and guesses - as a rule, they did not stand up to criticism.
And only in the sixties of the twentieth century, thanks to the work of Professor Gerald Hawkins, it became quite obvious: Stonehenge is an observatory created one and a half to two thousand years before Christ, a kind of "calculating machine of the Stone Age" … With its help, the ancient inhabitants of the British Isles could calculate the dates of the equinoxes and solstices, predicting solar and lunar eclipses and much more …
Further more. Little by little, a whole ramified network of similar prehistoric observatories began to appear on the world map (more than two hundred of them were found in England alone). The first appeared on it "Scottish Stonehenge" - Callanish, located on Lewis, the northernmost of the Hebrides. Then it turned out that many French megalithic structures also have astronomical significance.
Armenian researchers are studying the oldest astronomical observation platforms near the Metsamor hill near Yerevan - the legacy of the Stone Age civilization that existed there long before Urartu. Many similar Paleolithic observatories are known in Russia - in particular, in the Pomor north, where they are less large-scale than their Western European counterparts, but are in no way inferior to them in accuracy.
In 1987, on the territory of the Berlin district of the Chelyabinsk region, near the village of Aleksandrovsky, a hundred kilometers from the border of Russia and Kazakhstan, Arkaim was discovered - an ancient structure located on the site of an ancient volcano under a small layer of sediments. Arkaim's age is unique - he is one and a half times older than Stonehenge …
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Hypotheses - practical and not so
Why were these buildings needed, and even in such an incredible amount? From the point of view of a number of historians, everything is explained by the satisfaction of economic needs. It is known, for example, that the ancient Egyptians at the dawn of their civilization managed to establish a connection between the appearance of Sirius in the sky and the floods of the Nile, thanks to which the earth was not only saturated with fertile moisture, but also covered with a layer of fertile silt.
Therefore, it is more than logical to assume that people of the Stone Age erected observatories to check their agricultural calendar against the heavenly bodies - to determine the time of sowing, harvesting, and so on … However, it remains unclear why everyday agricultural needs required such precise astronomical observations.
Idealist historians, in turn, argue that the core of the problem lies in the instinct to learn. Why, what a catch: the creation of megalithic observatories was an extremely labor-intensive business, many hundreds, if not thousands of people had to work on their construction from year to year … Only a very rich society with surplus food and other resources could afford to exclude so many people for a long time from productive labor. Our distant forefathers did not possess super-rich resources, which means that only some extremely important goal could force them to undertake these great "construction projects of the century." But what is this goal?
Echoes of past disasters?
One of the "extravagant" versions is the fear of an impending universal catastrophe. Probably, people have preserved the memory of such cataclysms in the past. It could be about the death of Atlantis, the fall of meteorites and asteroids on the Earth, or even the Flood … Or maybe about the cyclical changes in natural conditions under the influence of cosmic factors?
Be that as it may, the memory of such events was entrenched in the public consciousness of our ancestors. So they were looking for threatening signs of impending disaster in the movement of the luminaries and planets, hoping, if not to prevent it, but at least to warn their fellow tribesmen.
Every year, more and more megalithic observatories of antiquity become known. Perhaps someday we will at least come close to solving the mystery of the astrologers of the Stone and Bronze Ages. But so far everything remains only at the level of hypotheses.
YURI SUPRUNENKO