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Then Aliens, Now Star Cave Paintings: Were Ancient Humans Aware of Universe’s Dark Secrets?

December 6, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by Nirmal Narayanan November 28, 2018 (ibtimes.co.in)

• We already know about the rock paintings discovered in Charama, India depicting aliens and UFOs. Now, researchers at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland have discovered 40,000 year-old cave paintings at various sites across Europe that indicate ancient human’s use of star constellations to keep track of time, and how star positions have changed over thousands of years.

• The astronomical charts may have also been used to represent particular dates and mark catastrophic events like asteroid hits. Apparently, ancient people were well aware of the effects of the earth’s gradual shift of rotational axis.

• “Early cave art shows that people had advanced knowledge of the night sky within the last ice age. Intellectually, they were hardly any different to us today. These findings support a theory of multiple comet impacts over the course of human development, and will probably revolutionize how prehistoric populations are seen,” said Martin Sweatman, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh and the lead author of the study.

• Have extraterrestrial aliens visiting the earth for thousands of years been teaching ancient humans about astronomy and space? The depiction of these ET beings on Indian cave walls is a strong sign of their influence. Did ancient humans worship these ‘Starmen’ as Gods?

A few years back, archeologists discovered pre-historic paintings dated back to 10,000 years that depicted aliens and unidentified flying objects (UFO). These rock paintings discovered in Charama, India soon became a hot topic among extraterrestrial buffs, and many people considered it an authentic proof of alien existence.

Humans knew what was happening in space

Now, a team of researchers at the University of Edinburgh has spotted another set of ancient cave paintings which made many experts believe that early humans were aware of astronomy. The cave paintings supposedly more than 40,000 years old were discovered at various sites across Europe, and they suggest that ancient humans used to keep track of time using the knowledge of how the position of the stars slowly changes over thousands of years.

Researchers who took part in this study revealed that symbols depicted in the caves are actually constellations, and they were used to represent dates and mark catastrophic events like asteroid hits. If the speculations of these researchers are right, ancient people were well aware of the effects which happen on earth due to its gradual shift of rotational axis.

“Early cave art shows that people had advanced knowledge of the night sky within the last ice age. Intellectually, they were hardly any different to us today. These findings support a theory of multiple comet impacts over the course of human development, and will probably revolutionize how prehistoric populations are seen,” said Martin Sweatman, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh and the lead author of the study, Eurekalert.org reports.

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Star Trek’s Humanoid Aliens May Not Be Far Off

October 31, 2018
ExoNews Editor

by Andrew Whalen October 18, 2018 (newsweek.com)

• In his new book, The Equation of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution, Charles Cockell, an astrobiologist at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, argues for the possibility of a “universal biology.” Extraterrestrials could look “eerily similar to the life we see on Earth,” said Cockell. “Life on Earth might be a template for life in the universe.”

• The possibility that aliens may be too strange to even recognize as intelligent life has been proposed as a possible response to the Fermi Paradox, which ponders why we haven’t yet encountered signs of extraterrestrial civilization.

• Cockell believes the physical laws underlying evolution likely reverberate up through complex, multicellular organisms, essentially establishing a restricted scope of biological possibilities, many or most of which may already be expressed on Earth. While Cockell’s suppositions are frustratingly untestable, his book gives argumentative validity to our depictions of aliens as four-limbed humanoids with roughly similar sensory apparatus.

• [Editor’s Note] Modern science continues to view life in the galaxy from the standpoint of a Darwinian ‘natural evolution’. But what if ancient beings from a billion years ago became the ‘creators’, and genetically manipulated a variety of infinite types of beings throughout the universe? And what if a creator in our particular part of the galaxy adapted these genetics to a standard human-form template to create the dominant intelligent humanoid being that dominates this section of the galaxy?

It’s commonly accepted that of course extraterrestrial life doesn’t look like aliens do on Star Trek. Real aliens, wherever they are and whatever they may look like, certainly haven’t spent a few hours in a makeup chair to add brow ridges or threat ganglia. The possibility that aliens may be too strange to even recognize as intelligent life has been proposed as a possible response to the Fermi Paradox, which ponders why we haven’t yet encountered signs of extraterrestrial civilization.

But while it may be spectacularly unlikely that alien first contact will be with people who look like us (except with bowl cuts and pointy ears), a new book argues we shouldn’t be so quick to assume extraterrestrial life will be so far out of our biological frame of understanding. Alien life may be more Star Trek than Lovecraft.

The Equation of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution by Charles Cockell, an astrobiologist at the University of Edinburgh, argues for the possibility of a “universal biology.”

“My view is underpinned by a simple proposition,” Cockell writes. “Evolution is just a tremendous and exciting interplay of physical principles encoded in genetic material. The limited number of these principles. The limited number of these principles, expressed in equations, means that the finale of this process is also restrained and universal.”

Cockell argues that carbon and water aren’t just incidental to life on Earth, but are close to the optimum material and medium for the emergence of organic life (so no silicon-based Horta), themselves bound by the narrow physical parameters in which organic molecules can exist.

Extraterrestrials could look “eerily similar to the life we see on Earth,” Cockell told Forbes. “Life on Earth might be a template for life in the universe.”

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