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1 - The awakening of astronomy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2015

David J. Eicher
Affiliation:
Editor-in-Chief, Astronomy magazine
Alex Filippenko
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Summary

Some 7 million years ago, a group of creatures made its way across the plains of central Africa. Resembling at first a collection of savannah baboons, the 30 or so beings shuffled along as dusk began to fall over a clearing in what we now call Chad. Adult females and flocks of offspring made up the nucleus of this foray, with a few mature males following up and looking for mating opportunities. As darkness began to fall, the group approached a cave that held a common shelter, and light from the Moon blazed down onto what now appeared like black, slumped forms – dirty, disheveled, hairy, and marked by spots of blood from the day's successful hunt.

These earliest hominids, perhaps Sahelanthropus, were the first bipedals, and walked more or less upright. They stand among the earliest creatures known from around the time of the human/chimpanzee divergence, when our ancestors began to make their own lineage that would one day lead to Homo sapiens. As these creatures, primitive by today's standards, shambled back to their nightly caves, they no doubt occasionally looked skyward, at the Moon and the stars. Perhaps they wondered what those lights in the sky meant. Somewhere around this time, some kind of creatures like Sahelanthropus became the first early human ancestors to ponder what space above meant to them.

Human knowledge about astronomy awakened painfully slowly, however. The earliest thoughts about the sky resulting in evidence we can examine were probably related to calendars and monuments, or tools for the planting and harvesting of crops, once humans became farmers. Although they weren't observatories per se, Stonehenge and other ritual Neolithic and Bronze Age sites betray a basic knowledge of the heavens. Egyptian, Spanish, Mexican, Irish, and Scottish stone structures nicely record celestial alignments. Stars no doubt also served as navigational tools for early explorers on land and on water.

Like all sciences, astronomy emerged from a primitive root that stunted progress for centuries – in this case, astrology. But as ideas emerged slowly and the astronomy of Antiquity began to inch forward, astronomy was a science of classification.

Type
Chapter
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The New Cosmos
Answering Astronomy's Big Questions
, pp. 1 - 16
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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