Stellar Petroglyph found in Inner Mongolia?

Inner Mongolia. Rocks. Petroglyphs. I found two out of three – not bad.Wishing Stones Photo by Moniqca.

From the People’s Daily Online comes news that a rock which may bear a depiction of the night sky has been discovered by Wu Jiacai – “a 50-year-old researcher in literature and history with Wongniute Banner of Inner Mongolia”. I’m wary of petroglyphs, but then I’m wary of most academic papers too*. There are some reasons to be optimistic about the findings. How do you date a natural rock with carvings to the neolithic?

“The stone was carved by neolithic dwellers,” said Gai Shanlin, researcher with the Inner Mongolia Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology (IMICRA) and an expert in stone carving. The carving style proves this, said Gai. Astronomers’ conjectures about the shape of the Big Dipper some ten thousand years ago also match the carving.

By bringing in an archaeologist it shows that Wu Jiacai is checking what he found rather than declaring himself right. I’m not sure if the part about the shape of the Big Dipper ten thousand years ago is a red herring though. It assumes that this was a high accuracy carving of the asterism, and whether or not it is an image of the heavens is the idea that’s being tested. A question I would ask is how many other carvings are there in the region? If there’s tens of thousands, then by sheer chance you’d expect some carvings to look like some asterisms. There’s mixed news on this:

“Finding a stone carving in China’s desert hinterland is a rare occurrence,” said Tala, director of IMICRA, who said it might help prove how ancient celestial bodies evolved.

If you want to be sceptical then you could ask “If the sky is important why aren’t there more carvings?” Well it could be the first to be found. Inner Mongolia isn’t famous for being well-explored and if people know roughly what they’re looking for similar items may be found. I’d take the opposite view – the lack of carvings reduces the random factor. Though not perfectly.

Apart from the Big Dipper, Wu also found some “unexplained images” on the stone. He thinks they may depict ancient gods, such as the god of the sun and the god of horses. Further study would be needed to determine when the pictures were painted.

This is the bit that bothers me most. If the researchers were finding meaning in random patterns then wouldn’t the result be that you could match some but not others. The converse problem is that when they’re creating artefacts people do make mistakes and change their mind. It could well be that some of the carvings were meant to be the Big Dipper and others were never meant to have any meaning. When you arrive at the stone thousands of years later without the aid of written records how do you tell the difference?

*I was going to write on the Monet astronomy paper published last week. I printed out a copy on campus, but forgot to take it home with me, so I won’t be writing about it till I’ve read it.