An article titled "A 41,500 year-old decorated ivory pendant from Stajnia Cave (Poland)" by Talamo, S., Urbanowski, M., Picin, A. et al. was presented at Nature Magazine's Scientific Reports, Sci Rep 11, 22078 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-01221-6. For the location of Stajnia Cave, please see the map at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71504-x.
That same pendant has now subsequently appeared in Nature Magazine's News, November 29, 2021, under the headline "Is this mammoth-ivory pendant Eurasia’s oldest surviving jewellery?", sub-headlined as "Radiocarbon dating suggests 41,500-year-old carved tusk fragment could be the region’s earliest known example of jewellery decorated by humans."
We do not analyze here the dubious alternative interpretative explanations offered by the archaeological mainstream community for the significance of the ivory carvings on the mammoth pendant, nor do we go into the radiocarbon dating of the mammoth ivory, whose carvings can of course be of a much later origin.
There is in our opinion a clear and inescapable interpretation of the mammoth ivory carvings possible -- our decipherment -- as portraying the midheaven of stars of the starry night sky, which carvings we thus date to ca. 7500 B.C.
Our date of ca. 7500 B.C. was selected because of our decipherment-required position of the North Celestial Pole in that era. The position of the North Celestial Pole changes slowly but continuously over a period of ca. 25920 years due to axial precession, so that a date of ca. 33420 B.C. would be theoretically, but not technologically, possible, when the North Celestial Pole was at this same location.
However, we regard an earlier provenance of the carvings to be impossible, since the sophistication of the stargazing astronomy represented here would fit well into post-Pleistocene Ice-Age technology, but not into previous technology eras.
To produce our decipherment, we created an independent, unaffiliated drawing of the most prominent lines on the pendant, as based on our analysis of a photo of the pendant in question as credited to Antonino Vazzana/BONES Lab see https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03534-y.
The Stajnia Cave Mammoth Ivory Carved Pendant ca. 7500 B.C.
Our Decipherment of the Holes, Lines and Figures as Ancient Astronomy viz. "Stargazing"
Marking the Starry Night Stars of Midheaven
The underlying star map was created
via Starry Night Pro astronomy software
while the explanatory marks are by Andis Kaulins of Traben-Trarbach
(click on the graphic to obtain our larger, original decipherment image)
The red dashed lines overlapping the Starry Night Pro star map clip underneath have been added by Andis Kaulins and are meant to correspond to the round marks found carved on the Stajnia Cave mammoth ivory pendant. The blue circular objects overlappingly drawn in the star map by Andis Kaulins identify groups of stars which correspond to figures viz. markings that we allege to be found carved on the pendant, but those identifications are speculative as such lines on the pendant are very weak, if they exist at all, and are difficult to prove. The dark grey lines added by Andis Kaulins mark areas with few stars in the sky that correspond to dark areas on the pendant. The light grey lines added by Andis Kaulins mark the outer perimeter of the pendant in the stars.
Late addition: please note that the lowest figure on this side of the pendant, called the "dorsal side", marks the stars of Ursa Minor. Our decipherment of the "ventral side" as corroborating ancient astronomy follows in the next posting.
