Did The Ancient Greeks And Native Americans Swap Starcharts?

Live Science ^ | 6-12-2005 | Ker Than

[blam]

Did the Ancient Greeks and Native Americans Swap Starcharts?

Author Ker Than

I had a story on SPACE.com yesterday about a very cool discovery: a one-thousand year old petroglyph, or rock carving, that was found in Arizona and which might depict the supernova of 1006, or SN 1006. The carving is presumed to have been made an ancient group of Native Americans called the Hohokam.

The researcher who made the discovery argues that symbols of a scorpion and stars on the petroglyph match the relative positions of SN 1006 to the constellation Scorpius when the star first exploded.

Well, after I wrote the article, a lot of thoughtful readers wrote in with a very good question: Scorpius is an ancient Greek invention, so what are the chances that Native Americans living more than an ocean away looked up at the night sky and also saw in the stars the outline of a scorpion?

As one reader succinctly put it:

“There are three possible solutions to this: Either the Hohokam people had the same name for the constellation as the Greeks, there was significant contact between North America and Europe prior to this date, or the petroglyph is a fake and does not date to that period.”

So which is it? Is the petroglyph an example of a cosmic coincidence, a hoax or startling evidence that the ancient Greeks and Native Americans had contact with each other?

I passed the question along to John Barentine, the astronomer who made the discovery. Barentine’s reply below:

[blam]

There were the same questions on FR.

[Dallas59]

Why couldn't the Indians have come to the Greeks?

[blam]

GGG Ping.

1006 AD Supernova

[KellyAdmirer]

“There are three possible solutions to this

Hey buddy, think again. Does it actually portray the Supernova? Academics can "argue" that it does all they want, doesn't necessarily make it so. I love arguments with built-in constraints that don't match the possibilities. Fine example of building a conclusion out of your fallacious premises.

[elcid1970]

Oh geez, the mormons are going to be all over this one.

[HHKrepublican_2]

I live in HoHoKus NJ im guessing that tribe lived right here?

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

“There are three possible solutions to this: Either the Hohokam people had the same name for the constellation as the Greeks, there was significant contact between North America and Europe prior to this date, or the petroglyph is a fake and does not date to that period.”

There is another answer. A bridge culture and we have it in Asia.

Asia had contact with Europe and Asia also had contact with North America. People are so eager to find a Transatlantic connection that they ignore that the Transpacific one was never truly broken.

Scorpio is not a great stretch when it comes to that constellation. It does indeed look like a Scorpion. The interesting one is Ursa Major which is called that by Greeks and American Indians alike.

[FreedomCalls]

"Scorpius is one of the very few constellations that actually resembles the creature it represents, especially with that unmistakable sting in the tail!"

The problem is the "scorpion" depicted in the petroglyph does not have that "unmistakable sting in the tail". It's more of a lobster shape -- all rounded. If anything, it looks more like a depiction of just another desert scorpion than a depiction of the constellation with its characteristic shape.

And then there's the problem with the fact that the petroglyph depicts TWO large scorpions and maybe one or more smaller ones depending on if you interpret the eight-pointed "star" as a star or as another smaller multi-legged scorpion.

[edpc]

As one reader succinctly put it:

“There are three possible solutions to this: Either the Hohokam people had the same name for the constellation as the Greeks, there was significant contact between North America and Europe prior to this date, or the petroglyph is a fake and does not date to that period.”

This is all very cute, but a fourth, more plausible possibility came to me immediately.....

Somone carved a likeness of something they saw in the sky....the supernova. The same artist, or another one, carved something you see quite often in AZ, a scorpion. The two are probably unrelated.

[blam]

Native Americans Recorded Supernova Explosion

[Finalapproach29er]

bump

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

There's another possible explanation.

It's a shopping list:

A couple of nice kohlrabi

A new barette

Some of that blue butter for the bugs that live in Og's crotch

Preparation H

Some squid

[edpc]

Squid in AZ? It won't be fresh.

;-)

[blam]

Scorpius

[FastCoyote]

"There were the same questions on FR."

Here's an even better question: When was the atlatl displaced by the bow and arrow. I don't have the resources to research this, but it appears smaller atlatl points were displaced by arrowheads around 600 AD. That would seem to date the European presence.

[Publius6961]

or the petroglyph is a fake and does not date to that period.”

Why would it have to be a fake? It could predate< that period.
If you draw squiggles on anything, randomly, many people seeing it days or a millenium later will he what he has trained himself to see. It could reperesnt (in someone's future mind) even something that has not yet happened. Fake is a word that comes to mind only if one steadfastedly insists that what one sees today is what the author intended, instead of pure randomness or coincidence.

[From many - one.]

That's one of the things that doesn't get talked about much.

Decades ago I read something in Scientific American that seemed to indicate Native American bow technology came by way of Asia,

[FastCoyote]

"bow technology came by way of Asia,"

But what is the date? Surely there are enough arrowheads and atlatl points to tell us when?

[Publius6961]

This is a good example of randomness.
Ask 1000 people to connect 18 of the dots in that rectangle (without showing any lines at all), and I doubt that a single one, unschooled in astronomy as a science would connect that particular set.

[Kirkwood]

Could just be someone's doodles. I'm sure ancient people doodled. Not much going on back then and it must have been boring waiting for crops to grow, rain to fall, and game to migrate. Why should everything we find from ancient civilizations have profound significance concerning history or science?