Sometimes I wonder if certain people really got the qualifications for their job, this is one such.
Mr John Barentine who works at the Apache Point Observatory have come up with a theory that a native american petroglyph depicts the supernova of the year 1006, yes 1000 years ago.
One of the reasons he think this is a depiction of a supernova is that it got something that looks like a star, well native american often used that shape.
What worries me is that Mr Barentine think that the image of a scorpion in the pertroglyph are some kind of proof.
The supernova appeared in the constellation Lupus (the wolf) which are located quite near Scorpius (The scorpion) but.....
The constellation we see are derived from cultures in the eastern Mediterranean (while the star names we use often are arabic). But the native americans are rather unlikely to see the same constellations as those from the old world. In short a small fact that make the theory derail completely.

More here

I had the same thought exactly.

Well, there are religions that still teach that native American cultures are derived from middle east cultures, so if he wants to keep rowing upstream, he should embrace one of these religions. There were a number of woo woo books written in the 1950's through 1970's that used similar petrographs as evidence spacemen had visited: These spacemen had helmets with 30cm antenna. So we were once visited by aliens without broadband technology

I think you are referring to the writings of Erich von Däniken, those books were one eye opener for me: That publishers dont have any responsibility whatsoever for the books they print.
He built his ideas on very loose ground such as the "spacemen" with "helmets" which most often were depictions of shamans who did wear masks and headwear since they were not supposed to show their face, and especially not the eyes.
Even though that tradition no longer are found among my people or the counterpart of the North Amercian native peoples, it is still found in a few places in the far east as well as in northern Siberia. No mystery. As it happens the latter Siberians peoples are the closest living relaives to the native Americans - which closes the (arctic)circle on this matter for me.

This Sky & Telescope news item is quite skeptical of this find:

http://skyandtelescope.com/news/article_1737_1.asp

This includes the pictograph near Penasco Blanco in Chaco Canyon
National Monument, New Mexico, which has been theorized to depict
the supernova of July 4, 1054, the one that made M1, the Crab Nebula.

The star is a common pattern in Chaco culture. But these symbols are, as far as I know, undeciphered until now. Perhaps some related native cultures (for instance the Pueblos) could hint at the meaning of these. But the story of the scorpion meaning the scorpion constellation is a real blunder. Scientists are humans, after all.

The stories of Daniken, Bergier and the like are at least 90% pure fantazy, usually built from real facts, but with clues removed to make believe into a mistery where there is not. But sometimes there are true stories in the lot. I remember for instance a story of a place with regularly spaced mounds, without known explanation. The mounds seemed even... to grow. Years after I found the explanation: inverted convection patterns in permafrost, making regularly spaced Benard cells.

I feel confident that any of the local natives can find an interpretation for those petroglyph, for the simple reason that im able to interpret most of those made by my own ancestors longer in the past than for the native americans, so its a good chance some of them have the knowledge in living memory.



Oh yes theres a lot of appearently 'strange' things that we see up here. I already have mentioned in connection with the discussions about the images from the Opportunity rover that stones can be lifted to the surface by repeated tawing and freezing.

Rounded pits in the ground are common, sometimes they are simpy blocs of ice that have melted some time after the last glaciation and others are hunting traps just a few hundred years old.

My father made certain that some of those animal trapping pits got archaeological protection, did for a time speculate that those larger holes might also be ancient systems of animal traps.

About a decade before he passed away we did in fact get the explanation you told about, and my father seemed happy to hear that explanation. Perhaps he was relieved that he didnt have to start thinking the storys we have about a giant people had some truth to them after all.
Even so I do think those stories were 'built from real facts' - and that they originated from our early meetings with the european peoples who at that time were a lot taller than us.

Its very common that the topsoil of slopes glides on a frozen deeper layer, this causes trunks of the arctic birch to grow in a bent manner. This is so common we dont consider it is the slighest strange and I think this is called 'creep displacement' in english.

Lastly we have round circles of moss here, again they got a perfectly good explanation just a few years back. Also those circles were associated with the stories about the 'giants' originally, but I will limit myself now since I see this post are getting long now and I have left the subject of astronomical things completely.

Thanks Myran for your native wisdom. Nice to see other people than just standard americans/europeans.

It is true that in Mongolia and Siberia thre are peoples who are ancestors of native americans.

Some other strange bits of info.

I remember an article about a kitovac village, papago tribe, where the native told the archeologists a story of their ancestors having killed a mamooth. They were even able to tell the place, and arcaeologists found there... mamooth bones, carcon14 dated 2000 years before. memory!

In another place on west coast, indians were telling a story of a "storm" where the sea invaded the land. of course colonists though it was just a "legend". But the explanation was found: a huge earthquake, centuries before, where the land subsided and was invaded by the sea.

Europeans set foot in America far before Christopher Colombus. We are sure the Vikings did centuries before, remnants of their dwellings were found. But others could have do the trip: any ship losing control along coasts of Morocco, Spain, France, England, is brought to the Caraïbes into about two months. This happened recently with a small ship, two persons aboard, one survived the trip. So it is possible that, casually, Egyptians, Romans or others (Gaelics, Wisigoths, early Christians) could have landed in America. They had no direct descendants (mostly where men) but they could have a strong influence on Indian people, up to start the civilizations in central America.

I don't remember the references, but recently in an Aztec or Maya tomb were found two jars of roman style. This is not astonishing at all, given the previous possibility.

But there are other stories which are more difficult to explain "rationally", such as, I don't remember which people of America, have a story of flying gods landing on their ground to tell them wisdom.

Transatlantic contacts may go back much further, to the Solutreans and the Clovis if I remember right.

Ancient folk memories of major geophysical events are a fascinating subject too (formation of Meteor Crater, flooding of the Black Sea, secular changes in the appearance of certain stars etc.), but it is one of those areas where it is hard for the lay person to distinguish beween wishful thinking or sensationalism and completely sound scholarship.

Yes, such events are numerous into the Bible, Coran or other religious writing. Some were related to proven facts. Some are more speculative (fllooding le Black Sea at end of the glaciacion, with peasans taking their livestock on a boat, and landing on a mountain range where the highest point is Mt Arrarat...) meaning that they are not proven. Likely (not impossible), but unproven. At last it is easy to make false archaeology starting from such stories, and there are many examples...

The most ancient proven story I know is the chinese habit to consider the polar star as a special divine one (the axis of the universe) and to give it names such as The Great Axis, etc. As this star was not alway the same with time, the chinese sky features a trail of axis names, beginning 6000 years ago...

In France several recent volcanoes have names related to fire, heat, cinder, etc... but they are all 6000 to 10000 years old!!

I once speculated on the net that the Great Flood mentioned in Sumerian
mythology and the Bible came from recalling when the Atlantic Ocean got
past the point where Spain and Africa now are and flooded the Mediterranean.

To anyone living at that time, no doubt it would seem like the world was
coming to an end.

The idea was dismissed, etc., etc., then what do I see 15 years later,
a couple of scientists saying essentially the same thing I did.

http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_noah.htm

No, I don't think they stole the idea, but it was "amusing" to have my
idea put down, only to see it picked up by two real scientists years later.

Crater Lake in Oregon is a caldera produced by the titanic explosion and collapse of Mount Mazama about 5000 years ago. When white men first reached the region in the early 19th century, the local Native Americans were still staying strictly away from that area -- although nobody could say why.

This really happened... 11 millions years ago, when the Gibraltar straight was closed. The mediteranean sea dried up to a depth of -2000m or more (which would have created very special climatic conditions, sort of Death Valley). Of course the flloding back was certainly spectacular.

But what we were speaking about was a more recent episode: during the last ice age, the sea level was low enough (more than -100m compared to today) to cut the Bosphorus straight. Then, the Black Sea having little sources of water (and much less than today during the ice age) it almost dried up to a small lake. Again such a place was likely to be hotter and very fertile, a good place for settlers. When the glaciation was over, and the mediteranean level rise again, the water went back into the Bosphorus and filled the Black Sea. Of course such a process was relatively slow, perhaps months, but if there was people living in there, they could only be awestuck by this strange phenomenon: sea rising and covering the world (what they called the world). We can imagine that some ancestors of Hebrews built a boat, put their family and cattle in, as would do any peasan, and sailed to the south until they found a firm land, at the foot of a mountain range where is the Mount Ararat. We can imagine that agriculture and civilization evolved prodressively in this oasis during the ice age, until the return of the sea erased any trace, giving the impression that agriculture and civilization appeared suddenly 6000 years ago.

See that this scenario is speculative (it is not proven) but it is likely, not illogical.





I heard a variant of this story, where the native were telling a story of fire on the mountain which wasted all the area. But some said that this element could come from a "contamination" by early settlers.


There is a well known example of such a "cultural contamination" of native lore. It is the story of the Dogons, who left the first missionaries flabergasted, by telling them that Sirius had a companion. There was a lot of litterature on this enigma, some wondering if the Dogon had not a much better eyesight than average (impossible). There cannot be five years passing by without this "mistery" resurfacing again and be used to prove which an which theory. In reality this enigma is solved for tens of years: the Dogon took their knowledge of the Sirius companion from earlier missionaries, and synchretized it with their own culture, without of source telling that they knew this from other missionaries!! The original Dogon culture is much more down to Earth, with animated seeds, plants and animals of their immediate environment.

Richard:

I believe that some underwater surveys of submerged Black Sea coastlines have indeed found pretty firm evidence of settlements - there was an article in New Scientist, ooh, five or six years ago, I think.

Bob Shaw

That hypothesis sounds intriguing, but I've read that it has some very serious flaws. Can't remember any example, though.

This is very likely a reference to the oral traditions of some of the native people on the British Columbia coast, which includes a story about a huge earthquake that happened just after sundown in wintertime. There is geological evidence of an earthquake in that area about 300 years ago, and Japanese tsunami records indicate a quake in the Pacific on January 16th, 1700 that (if it occurred near Vancouver) would have taken place at about 9:40 PM local time.

One of the geophysicists at University of Victoria (on Vancouver Island) gave a talk on this a few years back at the university I was attending at the time. A nice piece of detective work. Very nice.

Rob:

There's a whole bunch of dead trees, too - they got killed when their roots fell below the local water table, and were invaded by salt water. It all adds up to a very specific event!

Bob Shaw

Yes it is fascinating to track past events known only from oral memory transmitted from generation to generation. But the natives themselves were perhaps the most astonished to find their lore becoming provent science facts.

Rob and Bob, what I see with this discution, is that we can find extraordinary things without resorting to distortion of facts and kook hypothesis, as it is often the case into "archaeologia-fiction".

This hypothesis (that the flooding back of the Black Sea at the end of the ice age produced the dilluvium story) is plausible, but not proven. A similar explanation was proposed for the story of Atlantide (it would have be flooded by the rise of sea level at the end of the ice age). The main flaw I see in both is that it makes more than 6000 years of oral transmission for a remembering of such events.

Anyway, even if the story of the black sea is true, it will be difficult to prove. Likely we shall find on its bottom only peasants homes, raw stones walls and the like. Even if something like Noah's Arch really existed, it is very probable that this ship could not be distinguished from other ships existing at this epoch (or rather rafts) and anyway that it ended into fire wood. and that it never went above the today sea level. No chance to find its remnats ant top of Mount Ararat! If the background event is true, Noa'h biblical account would be the story of many peasants, at best tribal chiefs, who had to build rafts to escape the flooding, putting aboard their livestock. We know how a whole people can be symbolized by only one person into ancient tales, especially biblical reports. A hint of how the social hierarchy was considered: the god-like patriarch, and all the others, wife and peoples, were just his slaves, his belonging, like for us our shoes.


There are more traceable events telling us how an ancient fact can become a seemingly incredible or magical legent. I recently stumbled on a story which happened in France, in the 12th century, near Perpignan (at that epoch it was everything but french, but this is not the point). It is the story of the "babaos", a gigantic snake monster which invaded the Agly river, eating lot of people, to end up killed by the local land lord, an historical character. There are many variants of the story, but when the "babaos" was killed, his gigantic bones were placed into the churches of Rivesaltes and Arles sur tech. What makes this story interesting, is that these bones are still visible today. Of course, they were examined by scientists, which, what did you expected, found that they were whale bones. It is very clear here that there was a real fact (a whale engaging into a river, and unable to find her way back) and exagerations (the whale eating peoples, or, in a variant, killed on top of Mount Canigou, a near 3000m mountain).

We can still see such exageration or parasitic elements added to a true story today. Recently there was in Toulouse, France, a huge explosion in a factory called AZF, which erased the factory, killed about 30 persons and shattered the windows in half of the town. To this simple raw account, there was many stories added (many people seeming unable to accept that an well known and established factory could just explode by the fault of a trite human error and slack into security rules). The most incredible was a story of an electric discharge coming from a transformer into another neighbouring factory and zapping hundred of metres toward the faulty dock. But the most interesting is the story of an Arab worker, found among the deads, who had several underwears, a feature which was sometimes encountered into suicide bombings. Of course enquireers checked this hypothesis and found that the guy and his family were peaceful people, at the exact opposite of terrorists. And enquireers simply dumped this explanation. But from this time, the "terrorist explanation" is regularly "discovered" into the extreme right press, which regularly denounce the "terrorist plot" and the "censorship of this explanation by authorities"! Would such a thing happened into Middle age, we would have a nice legend of a monstruous plot, a pretext for a crusade!