Well, sadly this rant has been somewhat beaten to the punch by the ever entertaining and ever educational Archeoastronomy site. That said, I am not going to pass up on the chance to complain about how poor journalists are when it comes to science. Sadly, this time scientists themselves as just as much to blame.
A lot of news sites over the last few days have reported the presentation made to the American Astronomical Society regarding the recent discovery that native Americans may have recorded the AD 1006 Supernova. See http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/local/14926.php and http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13149432/ for examples, or if you don’t mind being depressed read through some of the links at http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=1006+Supernova+Indian+Astronomy. It is a touch depressing, the regularity that the same thing is repeated.
Now, as mentioned on Archeoastronomy, this glosses over some of the more interesting facts from the find – but where “I” disagree with Archeoastronomy is in the interpretation.
Basically, archeologists found some Hohokam cave paintings dating to around AD 1006 which depict what looks like a scorpion with a bright star over it. The AD 1006 astronomical event is assumed to have been bright enough to be visible pretty much everywhere on Earth, and certainly noticable. It took place in the constelation of “SCORPIUS” as this extract from the Tuscon Citizen explains:
To back up their hypothesis, Barentine and Esquerdo (the scientists) created a model of the night sky of May 1, 1006, to show that the relative position of the supernova to the constellation Scorpius matches placement of scorpion and star symbols on the rock.
All well and good you may think. There is precious little evidence that native Americans studied the stars or kept astronomical records, so you can see why people are jumping on this. It seems unlikely that any human civilization didn’t study the stars as part of their agricultural developments, but that is an entirely different story.
The critical thing I took from this is how desparate people are to make links – no matter how tenuous. Why on Earth would the Hohokam have used the same name / symbology for a constellation as the Greeks? Generally speaking each culture has radically different names for the constellations (In Europe we have been to heavily overrun by the Romano-Greeks to retain our own names, but the Saxons, Celts etc all called them different things – different animals etc)? There is no reason what so ever to think they would use the same concepts and it strikes me that the researchers involved have found a cave painting and shoe horned their model of what it means.
Shockingly bad astronomy if this is the case. It is a sad statement about education that none of the reporters seem to have noticed this.
Completely agree- I read the story and immediately thought, why would they assume a scorpion referred to the constellation we call Scorpio?
I read something similar a few years back about teh dogon people from somewhere in Africa who apparently worshipped Sirius – the so-called (by whom) “dog star” and the general conclusion of the articles wa sthat they had named themselves after the Dog star. That is so ludicrous it almost makes the scorpion thing make sense, but not quite.
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