A mere 60,000 years later, thousands of people around the world were using a vast array of high-tech digital and optical equipment yesterday to observe the red planet as it passes.

From the shores of Tahiti in Polynesia to outback Australia and Japan, amateur and professional stargazers aimed their telescopes at the eastern sky for a close encounter with Mars.

At 0951 GMT, Mars passed just 34.65 million miles from Earth, making it the closest such encounter since the Stone Age.

Hundreds of stargazers queued up outside the Sydney Observatory as dark fell, eager to look through some of about 10 telescopes set up in the observatory's grounds.

The last time Mars came nearer was around Sept. 12 in 57,617 B.C. when it passed about 34.62 million miles away. If you miss it this time you'll have to wait 284 years for another such close encounter.

But while Mars came the closest it has been to Earth since the Stone Age, man's long-held dream of landing on the planet remains as far away as ever.

The red planet has always fired the human imagination.

Mars was the god of war in Roman mythology and the planet made good copy for early science fiction, such as Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles." When Orson Welles broadcast "The War of the Worlds," HG Wells' story of a Martian invasion, many of his radio listeners were terror-stricken.

Fortune tellers, looking for clues in the sky to the future of an uncertain world, say that little good is likely to come from Wednesday's close encounter.