I just viewed this program on DW tv where the theory was that Stone Age priests somehow arranged the constellations to reperesent a map of Earth but the knowledge was lost among the years. The man who came up with this theory, Kai Helge Wirth, claims that the constellation of the Great Bear fits the outline of the Arctic Ocean. And surprisingly it kinda does. He also claims that the constellation of Iriadus (sp?) fits the river Aida (sp?) and that Scorpius fits the outline of Africa from the Canary Islands to Great Britain.

In the program, they give 'evidence' that humans could have once had the ability to 'program' the constellation because other animals use celestial bodies to navigate. These 'celestial bodies' they say are the sun and the moon. :roll: And according to them mallards or ducks use some constellations to navigate but they didn't say which ones.

Personally I find this theory to be very unrealistic but it is rather coincidental that the constellations sorta fit the outlines.

They have a short summary of the show at this link
http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,336...09_1_A,00.html

I don't know if anyone has seen this program besides me......

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I didn't think so:
Ursa Major
Arctic Ocean
It is apparant to me that this is another version of 'pictures in clouds' or Lenin in the shower. If you look hard enough for patterns in something you'll find them.
It is not so much a coincidence as it is Mr. Wirth taking constellations and then methodically searching the globe for a feature that somehow vaguely resembles it.

A good way to test this hypothesis of 'ancients programming constellations' is to form predictions from it. Here's what I immediately come up with:

1) The constellations would resemble earth features which were significant to the ancient cultures. The Arctic Ocean and the river Aida? Yah, those sound important to everyone. :roll: We should be seeing constellations that look like the (for example) coast of Britain, the Mediterranean Sea, or the Nile, Ganges and Tigris Rivers.

2) Ancient cultures should interpret constellations differently to match local features.

3) The lore describing the constellation would likely include references to these features, not surprisingly they don't.

In other words, Mr. Wirth, as described in your post, is a woo-woo. This theory gets a rating of :roll: from me.

Hey, look! The "face of Jesus" is actually Qui-Gon Jinn from The Phantom Menace!

Birds that migrate at night (such as geese) may use stars as navigation.
Never heard of whole constellations being used by them, usually individual stars such as Polaris are mentioned. Sun, moon and ground landmarks are also used.

That is the most fascinating fact I've heard in awhile. Where can I learn more about it?

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Looks like birds do orient themselves to constellations or star patterns. Only one species showned interest in Polaris.

Hereis an interesting experiment where they put birds in a planetarium to observe their reaction to the changing night sky.

If you have access to a university library you can look up:

Orientation in Birds by P. Berthold.

I could see how ancient cultures might assume the constellations were a map of earth, and would look for ones that match. But it obviously has no merit what-so-ever in reality. Mr. Wirth probably stumbled into the idea by overhearing some anthropologists, and decided he could make a buck or two off the gullible.

Or look at the physics involved. The ancient cultures involved - and keep in mind we're talking about a time when the wheel wasn't universal -would have needed to take objects with masses of billions of kilograms, apply a force to them over millions of light years, accelerate them to relativistic speeds, and then gently and neatly arrange them in such a way that they mapped out surface features on the Earth. They would have had to have done this so that the maps would still hold true after thousands and thousands of years in which the Earth's axis processed and the stars themselves moved but that would only be useful during certain seasons. They would also have done this without any other cultures inhabiting comparable latitudes noticing - or at very least without complaining that their maps were being screwed up. Pretty darn impossible.

On the other hand, they could have just picked the patterns to match well-known geography. This isn't as far-fetched as it seems. The problem is that the constellations they're talking about are pretty honkin' bright, as far as constellations go (we're not exactly talking about Camelopardalis here - we're talking Orion, Taurus, etc.). It would be an amazing coincidence that the most obvious groupings in the sky correspond to major landmarks on Earth, at least.

And for what it's worth, I find that a lot of the older constellations bear a pretty strong resemblence to their names. Granted constellations like Auriga and Cancer are a little wonky, but Taurus, Scorpius, Eridanus, Leo, etc. aren't that bad. I would, however, like to know where the ancients got the idea that bears had long tails....

In answer to the main question..... IMO.... No.

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I recall the story being that whoever put them up there in the sky (Hercules, maybe?) did it by swinging them by their tails, which were stretched out in the process. See, the ancients understood centrifugal force, too! (Though I can't vouch for their knowledge of centripetal force.)

You know... the constellation Leo looks a whole lot like the stain on the library floor... THE ANCIENTS MUST HAVE VISITED MY LIBRARY! Jeez, and I was only away from my desk for a few minutes, too!

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Somehow I doubt that the ancients knew how the earth looked from above in the first place. Lets start from there.

Now how can they compare something they did not know about with something they saw in the sky? They simply did not have the technology to travel significant distances and map this accordingly in the process. As far as I know paper and writing were not invented - so even in the unlikely case that generations of shamans have documented little bits of coast and creating some kind of large scale map from that, it all becomes very difficult, innacurate and unlikely.

Now what I can think of if I really go way out on this, is that the stoneage people did actually map stars to geographical features of a smaller magnitude - e.g. something that could be described or scribbled in sand or on rock, e.g. the scale of a few kilometers perhaps even more.

This by no means is compareable to oceans, seas and complete continents.

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