Astronomical knowledge 8. In the present territories of Lithuania and Latvia archaeologists find habitation sites of the ancient man established 11-12 thousand years ago, at the end of a 60000 year long glacial period during which the Baltic region was under the ice sheet at least for three long periods. With the recession of the ice, the land gradually turned into tundra with herds of reindeer going further north in the summer. Reindeer were followed by hunters who left their permanent settlements somewhere in the northern parts of Central Europe. These were men of the Paleolithic Swiderian and Magdalenian cultures, armed with spears, bows and flint-head arrows, bone and horn harpoons, stone slings, and followed by their domesticated dogs.
Art finds that reflect the spiritual world of the Paleolithic man are scarce.
However, burial grounds of that period survived to our time. The fact that ancient people were buried together with their clothes, decorations, daily life utensils and arms witnesses their belief in afterlife. An image of the heaven, as an extension of the earth, might also appear in the Paleolithic. The starry sky has been inhabited by different animals, while the Sun and the Moon were symbolically imagined as the deer. The people of the Nemunas and Kunda cultures who inhabited these forests, lived on hunting, fishing and gathering the food that nature provided.