A Calendar in the Sky
Who was the artist? 40,000 years ago, someone painted animals and geometric shapes that appear to be star patterns and the moon in a cave on the island of Borneo in Southeast Asia.
When people began drawing their world, the most common subjects were animals and the night sky. It was first assumed that these drawings were art. Later, others postulated they were painted for good luck hunting. In the 1960s, journalist Alexander Marshack proposed a more practical purpose for these drawings. They were created for telling time.
You can track the seasons by simply paying attention to the environment. For example, animals like deer and cattle are pregnant through the winter’s dark privation. They give birth when trees leaf out and grass grows tall.
But early humans needed a more precise way to time the seasons. It was important to know when to harvest fruit and berries, and when to migrate and hunt animals. The moon’s face and location on the horizon changes nightly. Along with the regularity of the seasons, the moon is a reliable marker of time.
So, the moon was a timepiece long before the first written language, the earliest cities, and organized religions. Early cave drawings likely combined time-reckoning with information related to the cycles of life.
The Shot
Friend and fellow photographer Jon Christofersen and I recently returned from photographing the night sky. We were in a premiere dark sky location: the Gunflint Trail in Northern Minnesota on the Canadian border.
Our base was Grand Marais on the shore of Lake Superior. During our last night of photography, smoke was blowing in from Canadian wildfires. While the stars would quickly disappear, it had a magical effect on the setting moon.
We set up on a rock on the shore of Lake Superior near the campground outside of town. Because of the smoky horizon, the moon and moonlight reflecting on the lake were a deep orange, beautifully pairing with the deep blue sky of twilight.
We watched and photographed as the moon disappeared into the distant haze. I couldn’t help but wonder how many people over the last 15,000 years watched the moon from this same rocky shore. And were they simply enjoying the view or “checking the calendar?”
Thanks for looking,
Chuck Derus