10,000 year old sun dial found in Australia

Apparently scientists have confirmed that a stone sun dial in a secret location in Australia is the world's oldest time piece, even older than Stonehenge and the pyramids.

www.news.com.au

They have confirmed that it lines up with the movements of the sun and was presumably built by indigenous Australians.

You wouldn't THINK that the ancients would be that concerned with time by the hour.

But I guess they had lawyers back then too.

reply to post by FarArcher


You make an excellent point.

Regardless of 'whom' made these 'sun-dials' and so forth throughout ancient-ANCIENT history (*cough* aliens)

It is dumbfounding to consider WHY they might need such a precise tool...

Or HOW they deciphered how to create it...

(yes... obviously weather/season/crops/food surplus reasons for the obvious) but you don't necessarily need a sun dial for that.

unless its not a sundial at all
second line

reply to post by MavRck


As for the why it says in the article linked in the OP..

its two points set in perfect alignment with the setting sun on a midsummer's day.

This made me wonder - if it showed the summer solstice, maybe it shows the winter solstice too. So, I went looking and found..

Aboriginal Astronomy

along with this PDF. (Scroll down to case 4:3)..

Case Study 4.3: Wurid

These indicate it points to the Equinox as well as the Solstices. The PDF states the area was occupied around 25,000BC and the site could be that old.

What I find really fascinating is the it points to the Solstices and Equinox. Targeting the dates happens in ancient structures all over the globe, (Europe, Egypt, South America and now Australia). Were these dates part of some ancient religion and did it start in Australia?

Well it seems impressive until you get past the hyperbole of the article.

First no one has a single clue when the circle was built

Its construction date is unknown, and could be anywhere in the range c. 25000BC to about 1835AD.

and second it's not that accurate as a sundial

However, a sceptic might still raise some doubts. First, the outliers are only accurate to a few degrees - could these alignments have occurred by chance

It would be cool if there was some way of dating it, but there seems not to be

csiro
Astronomical heretige pdf

reply to post by davespanners


As with other sun dials around the world, the key key puzzle is how did they manage to do it with the ability to keep accurate data over huge spans of time in generally primitive, rudimentary cultures and societies that allowed such deductions of nature's timetable? Where did that wisdom come from, why does it seem to be a universal first step in science for a civilization when not a shred of such complex thinking existed otherwise? What indications do we have of the basic record-keeping and math that allowed such thinking? The usual explanation is that early wise men studied the heavens and eventually, viola!

Accuracy to the hour or even day is irrelevant with sun dials. A sun dial is more than a daytime timepiece. To call it a "sun dial" as we known them set up in gardens, etc. is a false attribution of the structure, a shadow (pun intended) of its original intent and purpose. They are an almanac, a nature-based computer for keeping track of and estimating about nature in its most basic form yet vital to early cultures and societies.

Primative societies had little need for precise instruments, but yet here they seem to be, scattered around the world. The only explanation is that some higher power said, here, build this thing and it will be of great service to you. All the locals had to do was to supply the materials and the manual labor. The education of the local leaders and shaman to using the device alone would have been a formidable task. It was a technological advantage over nature that they never had before in a tangible form. Sun dials did not necessarily teach them how the sun and earth worked together. No doubt, none of the languages could handle such concepts that task. That was left to them to discern las they grew in understanding. For the earl times, sun dials served to simply show them how the light or shadow falling in a particular place among the stones was a time to start planting or preparing for winter, etc. Nothing was required beyond that for thousands of years. Similar to our second seconds hands on a clock, that finite features of sun dials would be relatively unimportant, but yet always inherent in the design, always there if the need arose.

All of this has been to say that the ancients, regardless of where around the world, were given a very primitive tool to met their current needs. It has only been modern understandings of the universe that have revealed the full breadth of that hidden gift. Yet few want to ask the question of who did this for us and seek a rational answer.