Aerial Activities of Ancient Man
People nowadays think that it was the Italian Galileo who invented a workable telescope some three hundred years ago, based on the sixteenth century versions produced by Dutch lens makers, thus making modern astronomy a feasible undertaking. Crude lenses from much earlier have been found in Crete and Asia Minor dating from 2000 BCE. Very fine 1000-year-old elliptical lenses have been found from a Viking site on the island of Gotland, probably made by Byzantine or Eastern European craftsmen.
The Roman writers Pliny and Seneca refer to lenses being used by engravers. The real question is why, since the lenses were routinely used for starting fires, magnifying small objects, even for spectacles, and mankind has an ongoing interest in observing celestial phenomena or looking up at the sky, it took so long to make a workable telescope. One archaeological finding provides evidence to believe that perhaps the Europeans were not the first to produce them. The ICA Museum in Peru has a stone carving of a human figure that has been dated back to at least five hundred years ago.
The significance of the carving is that the figure depicted appears to be examining the sky with a telescope in his hands. Moreover, there is a celestial body in the carving as well, possibly a comet with a tail, that the figure seems to be observing. Such a unique discovery puts stress on the present contemporary belief that the Europeans invented the telescope in the sixteenth century.
Dr. Javier Cabrera in Peru has collected many such engraved stones. Besides astronomy, themes of pictures on his stones include organ transplantation, blood transfusion, and chasing dinosaurs, among other things. It is difficult to date the stones. A chronological history of Spain once mentioned that such stones had been discovered in ancient tombs of the Incan Empire. People thus infer that the astronomy-based stones are at least five hundred years old. Logically speaking, the stones that depict creatures such as dinosaurs may be considerably older than originally believed
If it is indeed a telescope that is depicted on the stone from the ICA museum and such devices were commonplace around the globe, it could help scientists to understand why the Dogon, a tribe in Africa, has developed such advanced astronomical knowledge. The Dogon tribe lives at the big turn of the Niger River in southern Mali, western Africa. They lead a mainly rural and nomadic life. Without written language, they pass down knowledge orally from generation to generation. In their religious doctrine that has been passed down for over 400 years, a star called Sirius B by astronomers, a companion star of Sirius, was accurately described. This astonished modern astronomers.
Sirius B is very faint and invisible to human eyes. Based on observations recorded using modern instruments, astronomers discovered Sirius B in the 19th century. The Dogon people supposedly did not possess any modern technological instruments, but generation after generation they have passed down legends about Sirius, which includes a reference to the Sirius system consisting of two stars.