[X] My Assistant

[Guest_Myran_*]

Sometimes I wonder if certain people really got the qualifications for their job, this is one such.
Mr John Barentine who works at the Apache Point Observatory have come up with a theory that a native american petroglyph depicts the supernova of the year 1006, yes 1000 years ago.
One of the reasons he think this is a depiction of a supernova is that it got something that looks like a star, well native american often used that shape.
What worries me is that Mr Barentine think that the image of a scorpion in the pertroglyph are some kind of proof.
The supernova appeared in the constellation Lupus (the wolf) which are located quite near Scorpius (The scorpion) but.....
The constellation we see are derived from cultures in the eastern Mediterranean (while the star names we use often are arabic). But the native americans are rather unlikely to see the same constellations as those from the old world. In short a small fact that make the theory derail completely.

More here

[ngunn]

Transatlantic contacts may go back much further, to the Solutreans and the Clovis if I remember right.

Ancient folk memories of major geophysical events are a fascinating subject too (formation of Meteor Crater, flooding of the Black Sea, secular changes in the appearance of certain stars etc.), but it is one of those areas where it is hard for the lay person to distinguish beween wishful thinking or sensationalism and completely sound scholarship.