Boomtime For Ancient Ireland Traced To Sligo

I was reading last night that the coast of Antartica was 'briefly' ice free around 4,000BC and it was at this time that someone mapped it and from this source came the Peri Ris(sp) map via the library at Alexanderia.

GGG Ping.

I doubt it could be ice-free: such a development would flood low-level places like Mesopotamia for a long time needed to re-freeze and accumulate the ice back. Sumer dates from ca. 3600 yrs BC- uncomfortably close.
It would also show in Antarctic ice cores.

That knocks the Ceide Fields in North Mayo off the top of the list; they are only 5000 years old.

Thanks for the ping.

I'd not put too much stock in the Piri Reis map, and while its information is attributed (by text on the map itself) to the time of Alexander the Great, there is no trace of any cultural continuity that old, other than the cave runes (and those don't occur in anything like an actual text).

That said -- navigation between the continents would have been easier during times of lower sealevels, or at least no more difficult. Like most long distance navigators from (known) ancient times, such folks would have used the river estuaries for harbors. Artificial harbors might be something to look for on the continental shelf in order to determine how advanced the antediluvian cultures got.

Going from Africa to South America might have been facilitated by lower sealevels. All other things being equal, lower altitudes are warmer, the water is more often in a liquid state, and food is more plentiful.

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Hey! I wonder if all the Irish Megolithic navvies went off to build the pyramids, same way as the Paddies built the UK highways with McAlpine's Fusiliers? ;-)

Archaeoastronomy Links Stone-Age Tomb Builders With Sun
Dublin - Apr 22, 2003
Using techniques from the science of archaeoastronomy, this research has already identified significant astronomical orientations in the larger focal tombs and significant patterns in the relative orientations of the monuments... Loughcrew is a nationally important archaeological landscape located 70 km north-west of Dublin in County Meath. It is the site of one of the four major passage tomb cemeteries in Ireland and dates from the Middle Neolithic (3600-3100 BC) and later... Previous investigations by archeologists indicate that these monuments were landmarks on the Neolithic landscape, and the larger focal tombs and their smaller surrounding satellite tombs would have had a major impact on prehistoric communities and their ritual and ceremonial practices. Frank Prendergast's investigations show that two of the largest focal tombs are oriented towards the rising Sun at the equinoxes... It is well known that many such tombs found elsewhere in Ireland and beyond, such as at Newgrange, are oriented towards the direction of the rising Sun on the solstices... [A]t Loughcrew, there is a pattern of orientation between many of the smaller satellite tombs -- both towards each other and towards the two focal tombs.

I don't buy into archaeoastronomy, and so I left in that final sentence -- that the smaller tombs face each other and the two large tombs. The orientation of the larger tombs probably are not the same as each other, that is, they point in a general direction, possibly due to then-existing terrain (megaliths require stable ground).

I'd guess that the stable chronology of 4200 BC is fixed somehow using astronomical speculation. Whereas I don't doubt that the megaliths are very old, I'd never rely on such a kludge. If these were somehow dated using cosmic ray exposure or something like that, okay. :')

"I don't buy into archaeoastronomy."

I do. I remember in my youth, before TV and wide-spread use of air conditioning, we spent many evenings outside staring at the heavens. I expect our ancestors did too. Albeit, I think some make astronomy connections where there are none.

Davies' The Isles talks about the earliest bones going back around 7,000 years as the area was slow to shake off the glaciers. The megaliths seemed to have wound down on their own long before the first Celts came up to the 'Green Isles' from the Iberian Peninsula around say, 3,000 years ago.

Very interesting.

Of course, everyone knows that Ireland was the Garden of Eden, and that Adam and Eve were as Irish as Paddy's pig.

I don't buy into archaeoastronomy…

I remember a book, I think it was "Stonehenge Decoded" or something like that. Quite persuasive on the astronomy part.

...was put to rest at an archaeology conference in Sligo.

One thing I've learned about archaelogy, if nothing else, is that when something is "put to rest," it merely means that a temporary truce has been agreed to,

D-fendr: I remember a book, I think it was "Stonehenge Decoded" or something like that. Quite persuasive on the astronomy part.

Even its author, Gerald Hawkins, has repudiated much of that book. Please see the article snippets I quote below.

blam: I remember in my youth, before TV and wide-spread use of air conditioning, we spent many evenings outside staring at the heavens. I expect our ancestors did too. Albeit, I think some make astronomy connections where there are none.

I agree -- with no TV/radio, and with male nocturnal activity (women awake during the day, men awake at night, which probably explains the disagreements about when to "do it") being what it probably was, the stars, shooting stars, moon, and comets must have been a big part of the prehistoric entertainment industry. There are some pretty "out there" claims regarding ancient knowledge of things like precession which is pretty frankly ludicrous. And the only text (of which I'm aware) supporting archaeoastronomy at an archaeoastronomical site occurs in the Americas; therefore it is rejected as being marks of plowshares or whatever ad hoc unsubstantiated criticism comes to mind. :')

In the shadow of the Moon
book mentioned in article
At 8.45 on the morning of 15 April 136 BC, Babylon was plunged into darkness when the Moon passed in front of the Sun. An astrologer, who recorded the details in cuneiform characters on a clay tablet, wrote: "At 24 degrees after sunrise-a solar eclipse. When it began on the southwest side, Venus, Mercury and the normal stars were visible. Jupiter and Mars, which were in their period of disappearance, became visible. The Sun threw off the shadow from southwest to northeast." If present-day astronomers use a computer to run the movements of the Earth, Moon and Sun backwards from their present positions, like a movie in reverse, they find something very odd. The total eclipse of 15 April 136 BC should not have been visible from Babylon at all. The zone of totality should have passed over the Spanish island of Mallorca, 48.8 degrees west of Babylon-a difference of more than one-eighth of a complete rotation of the Earth, or 3.25 hours. The only explanation is that the planet's rotation has slowed since 136 BC, making the day longer. Of course, there are many other records of the ancients observing cosmic events, from supernovas to comets, but the value of these sightings to modern science is limited. Reports of eclipses, however, are in a class of their own. If the Earth has accumulated a change in orientation equivalent to an eighth of a turn in just over 2000 years, then we can infer that the day has lengthened by an average of a few milliseconds a century. This is an extraordinarily precise figure to deduce from historical records. In fact, it is without precedent.
Varsity Online
Cambridge scientist Dr Leslie Morrison, from the Royal Greenwich Observatory, and Professor Richard Stephenson, from the University of Durham, have discovered that the world is spinning at a faster rate than people had expected. Compared to records taken between 700 BC and 1000 AD, the scientists found that a day is now 42.5 milliseconds longer - much less than predicted. It is though effects from the last Ice Age have caused a flattening of the Earth's poles, making it spin faster.
Solar eclipse
translated by Google and AltaVista
[www.nzz.ch/dossiers/dossiers1999/sonnenfinsternis/sonne990811hc.html]
On 15 April in the year 136 BC it became darker and darker in the course of the in the morning in the metropolis Babylon, until suddenly the sunlight shrank completely from the sky: The new moon had shifted itself between earth and sun and for minutes the Himmelsgestirn had completely covered. The total solar eclipse was observed by the Babylonian astronomers in all details... If one lets the astronomical film run backwards, one comes likewise to the solar eclipse from 15 April 136 BC. If one feeds the computer the values of the present angular speed and movements of earth, moon and sun, however a strange result results for that historical darkness: It should have taken place not in Babylon, but in the Spanish Mallorca. A geographical error of nevertheless an eighth of an earth revolution, which equals a delay of 3.25 hours on the cosmic timetable... [In] 1695 Edmond Halley concluded from the data the fact that the moon in the course of the centuries circled faster and faster around the earth and had continued to hit therefore the shadow of the moon at the point in time of a passed darkness somewhat east on the globe than due to a later darkness had to be expected... [In 1787] Pierre Simon de Laplace... postulated [that] the moon moves not faster, but the earth turns more slowly... Delaunay assumed a braking action by tides, as the tidal bulge moving from Moon's gravitation constantly in opposite direction for rotation over the earth's surface restrains the globe... Moon's gravitation distorts the flexible globe in the course of the month...The fact that a solar eclipse sets on the earth's surface a rapidly moving shadow label of at the most 250 kilometers width, makes it an event singularly precise in time and space. By the analysis as much as possible certifications of historical sun darkness would like to quantify Stephenson and Morrison also subtle modifications of the earth rotation in the course of thousands of years... Beside the Babylonian recordings, which cover the period of 700 BC to 75 AD, the Chinese data of 720 BC... From the data Stephenson and Morrison calculated a middle increase of the daily length [during the past] 2500 years by 1.7 milliseconds per century... A slow oscillation is still puzzling with one period of 1000 years.
Solar eclipse
by Thomas de Padova
translated by Google and AltaVista
[www2.tagesspiegel.de/archiv/1999/08/03/ak-ws-na-42876.html]
The British researchers Richard Stephenson of the University of Durham and Leslie Morrison, formerly at the Royal Greenwich observatory in Cambridge, determined up to one second exactly, when the darkness must have achieved which place of the earth in the year 136 before Christ. And they came to an astonishing result: The solar eclipse at that time could have been observed according to the calculations not at all in Babylon, but approximately 50 degrees further west with Mallorca... Stephenson and Morrison checked so far approximately 300 historical recordings at the computer... The fact that the earth turns... ever more slowly [means that] while the earth is braked, the velocity of the moon increases. It becomes faster and creeps [away by the centimeter]. Scientists of the satellite station of the federal office for cartography and geodesy in cell in the Bavarian forest transmit laser pulses again and again to the moon. Astronauts of Apollo 11 left a mirror there which reflect the laser beams... The measurements prove that the moon recedes about four centimeters from the earth every year.

Historical Eclipses and Earths Rotation
F. Richard Stephenson

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