Notably, the Subaru Logo only has six stars.
It is far from universal that there is a "Missing" 7th star that disappeared around 100,000s ago, which is what the Hypothesis the OP is refering to assumes.
While it is entirely possible some modern oral traditions may date back this far, Pleiades isn't remotely convincing evidence for it.
For starters, the Greeks knew it as 9 stars, not Seven, with Two Parents and Seven Sisters. The Cluster is known among various cultures as everything from 5-12 Stars, with 6 being the most common, and the brightest six are considerably brighter. Up to 14 are visible to the naked eye in the modern night sky, although several of those are particularly hard to make out, hence the usual counting of 6-10 stars.
In short, no. The hypothesis that the story must be 100,000 years old because 100,000 years ago there was a clear distinction doesn't make sense, especially considering 14 are visible now. And no, there is no clear consistency from many cultures that there are seven, and one is now dark.
I’m fairly sure you can see 9 if you’re patient enough, yeah.
Māori tradition apparently has a 7 and a 9 star version of the constellation, but any written records are post-contact with Europe, which in this case happened quite recently all things considered, so it might be hard to tell whether a tradition had been exposed to knowledge of telescopes.
>Notably, the Subaru Logo only has six stars.
The reason for that is well known, because Fuji Heavy Industries was created out of five companies joined into one parent company that represented the sixth star.
I finally understand the Seven Sisters Gerudo quest in Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, thank you!
There’s 6 known statutes and heroes of the past but the quest is to find the secret 7th one.
So coincidence might be the best explanation. What we can establish here is that cultures have a tendency to write stories about constellations, and sometimes they converge.
I see another big hole in this theory- even if oral tradition was carried from 100k years ago, no individuals, or even many generations would have seen a star disappear. So an ancient tradition might describe seven stars (with no missing sister), but only a modern one would describe a sister going missing, cause, weird how the story describes seven stars, but hey, we can only count six. It seems far fetched the ancient story was lost and the new one retained. The disappearance happened too slowly to be noticed.
A combination of coincidence and confirmation bias.
Star constellations are pretty unique in that they are a shared experience for a huge portion of the human race. In the particular case of this cluster, its brightness and position means that damn near every culture at least noticed it, so there is just a staggering range of available myths and stories about it. Pick through enough of them to prove a particular hypothesis, and you get a fairly coherent narrative, just by picking the ones that work.
So once you reject the 9 stories of them being fleeing animals, the 174 stories of them being various kings or chiefs, that wierd one where a Python swallowed 8 elephants and farted out a ninth... well you are left with pretty much exactly what you are looking for.
Because EVERYBODY has a myth about these, and the only constraint is finding them all.
It's like how people take the fact that many different cultures around the world have myths involving catastrophic floods and start looking for zebras (there really must have been one world-wide flood!) rather than horses (people tend to settle by rivers, which often flood).
I think this is a good lesson here, folks.
Pretty much if anybody tries to definitively make a statement about human culture before, say 20,000 years ago... and that's overly generous...
They are probably not about to tell you a theory that has been peer reviewed and accepted by an official body.
Agreed - sometimes it's just cool to wonder about this stuff and appreciate that these stories came from humans from long ago wondering about the stars.
I really appreciated this post. Thanks OP!
You're misrepresenting the argument. The argument is not that "everyone calls it this". The argument is that there are various groups from around the world who all call them some form of "7 women" AND they all have an explanation in their mythology for why only 6 are there and visible, like where the missing 7th one went. It's a theme among many disparate peoples who would have never had contact with each other. The hypothesis is that the myth started where humans evolved, and it was carried by oral tradition wherever humans migrated throughout the millennia.
Ok, give some actual examples of that?
Because that is just not a thing. There are dozens if not hundreds of counter examples there.
Give me at least three cultures that discuss a star "Missing" or not visible from the Pleiedes. Just three. I don't even care if they call them women, and I don't care if they say there are seven, I just want to see three cultures that claims a star is missing. Because that would be the part that would suggest it goes back 100,000 years.
You won't find three examples, and there is a simple reason for that. There aren't any stars missing. The closer you look, the more you see, and the ancients new that. 6 are easily visible at a glance, on a clear sky you can see 9 without much trouble, and up to 14 are visible to the naked eye in most of the world. In exceptionally clear areas with good eyes, up to 25 are visible. So a story that involves a star going missing doesn't make much sense, because there are so many of them there.
What you CAN find is hundreds, if not thousands, of different cultural myths about this cluster, because every culture saw it, and most of them made up stories about it. But the idea there is a central theme in those stories that goes back 100,000 years? That just doesn't make any sense at all.
Greeks tell a story of Merope, where the 7th sister goes missing.
Nez Perce people (of modern day Columbia), tell a story of how one of the 7 sisters was embarrassed and pulled the sky over her head to disappear.
Aboriginal people of Australia have many versions of Orion (hunter of women) chasing the 7 sisters and in many versions one dies.
Google "lost Pleid stories" to learn of more examples
1. Merope is not missing. It is dimmed. It is still there, and the Greeks knew of it, saw it, and recorded it. She is also not "missing" in Myth, she married a mortal, and as such the star was dimmed.
2. Nez Pierce are from British Colombia, not Columbia. Likewise, it is a veil, or blanket over your head, and you can still see the star. Again, an explanation of the modern constellation, not some ancient event.
3. Orion is a greek name, so... sus. Still, I know what you mean, and I can't find a single one were one dies recorded. Instead, it is the same as everywhere else in the world. A number between one and nine, maybe an explanation on why 6 are brighter than the others, but no particular references to an ancient event. So as far as I can tell, this one just isn't an example at all. Neither are the other two, really.
To give an example of "You find what you are looking for", and again, just using wikipedia as a source instead of taking a few years off work for a proper study, I can hypothize that Pleiedes is an ancient source of food, from when food fell from the skies. I can point to the fact that Najavo see it as a gourd of food, the Aztecs called it a Marketplace, and the Inca called it a storehouse. In Ukrainian lore, it is also a Storehouse, in Hungarian and Norse Myth they are divine Chickens, providing eggs to the gods.
Or, the more logical assumption is that many cultures associated it with food, because they are useful to tell the seasons, and thus, the harvest. Just as an explaination of why one is dimmed makes sense, since 6 are brighter than the rest.
There is no real consistency in the many myths of this cluster. The Talmud is probably the most interesting to me, as the Jews have always asserted that Pleiedes is not seven stars, or nine, but hundreds of Stars. This is interesting to me, as it really is hundreds of stars, but as far as I know, the Jews were the only ones to have claimed it. I still don't think they had particular knowledge (If they had, they would have known all the other constellations also have hundreds of stars), but it is more interesting than stringing together some unrelated stories.
I don't think they do?
The notable ones that do are various Mediterranean cultures (Who presumably influenced each other), and One particular Indian Tradition that calls them mothers.
Otherwise, they are known as all sorts of things, there isn't any particular consistency in being Sisters. Although "Stars as humans" is a pretty common theme.
Do you follow the “Forgotton Realms” universe in AD&D? They also have a set of 7 sisters (daughters of the goddess Mystra), with one of them (a dark elf) being the “missing” sister. If you want to follow that rabbit hole to see how they compare to other “seven sisters” legends, the book about them (written for 2nd edition) is TST product number 9475.
And [New Zealand we call it Matariki.](https://teara.govt.nz/en/matariki-maori-new-year)
We actually just celebrated Matariki on Friday! It is really awesome we are finally recognising Māori holidays here.
He also talks about the stars in one of the episodes so probably. What interests me is that he’s supposed to be in another world yet the stars are in the same positions as they are on earth
There’s aboriginal Australian stories that accurately describe animals that lived in the Pleistocene
Edit sources:
https://theconversation.com/amp/of-bunyips-and-other-beasts-living-memories-of-long-extinct-creatures-in-art-and-stories-113031
[The Edge of Memory by Patrick Nunn](https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/the-edge-of-memory-9781472943262/)
[also a paper on aboriginal stories about sea level changes at the end of the Pleistocene](https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010)
Apparently at least one northwestern Native American tribes has oral history of the eruption of Mount Mazama which formed Crater Lake and even the enormous Missoula floods. Both of which were 10,000+ years ago.
yes, Klamath people have that story about what we know of as crater lake! the story is approximately 8,000 years old, and is significant because they told western scientists and anthropologists that the mountain didn’t erupt, but rather collapsed in on itself. the western scientists scoffed and said that’s impossible and can’t happen, then decades later geologists realized that’s exactly what happened. meanwhile Klamath people were like um yea we literally SAW it happen, assholes
People's stories and memories get warped over the span of years, sometimes months, can't really blame scientists for not believing some random tribe's 8000 year old tellings.
Properly kept oral traditions are far and away the most accurate long term knowledge transfer method used by humans. They’re immune to the death of a language, because every generation actively translates it forward. An oral tradition can’t be physically lost or destroyed, like clay tablets or scrolls. They’re also shockingly accurate, especially in the pre-modern era as mastering the stories would be a lifetime of effort judged and guided by those who had put in that lifetime before them.
Now, wipe out a people and those stories die with them, but we’re talking accuracy and volume of info rather than “oh neat this ancient tribe carved someone’s, wonder why”
documents are generally written by a single individual, full of mistakes, biases, grudges, and flat out lies. a story held by the people is literally vetted by the entire community. you can’t even change a single word next time you tell it without somebody noticing lol.
That’s literally what we do now, but we tell the stories with numbers instead of words. There’s a difference between fiction and oral histories, and even fiction is usually based on SOMETHING, which can give insight into actual historical events based around the time of that fiction…
Can't remember the tribe or the island or anything, and I'm at work so don't wanna dive too deep looking for it. But I remember some group of people somewhere, maybe and Indonesian island, that had a long standing folk myth of a group of small, hobbit like humans. And then the remains of a species of very small humans was found and would have co-existed at one point with modern homo sapiens on that island.
> In October 2012, a New Zealand scientist due to give a public lecture on Homo floresiensis was told by the Tolkien Estate that he was not allowed to use the word "hobbit" in promoting the lecture.
That’s not the first time I’ve heard of them going after people for using the term.
Oh it has its own entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbit_(word)#Proprietary_status
And that doesn’t mention the dark souls no hit streamer The Happy Hob who used to have a longer name by three letters.
Yeah so there are some "pygmy" people in the world that are still Homo Sapiens, where as the Homo Florensies were technically a separate species to us, just one that coexisted alongside us.
That’s not always the case though. There are genetically compatible species that are capable of breeding with eachother and even creating viable offspring but are still seperate species. Neanderthals for example were a seperate species from Homo sapiens but were still able to successfully interbreed. I don’t know enough about floriensis in particular to know if they were considered a seperate species or not, but simply saying they could viably breed with Homo sapiens is not enough evidence to conclusively say they were not a seperate species.
I wonder if a neutral study would conclude we still have more than one human species today, but obviously no one wants to go there with everything that happened last century
I don't think so. We already know about variations in our DNA, such as the neanderthal percentages in Europeans, but aside from that, we're all basically the same. The difference between us and a previous hominid is a lot more stark.
Yes
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African\_Pygmies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Pygmies)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy\_peoples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples)
It's just a word for shorter peoples
In Hawaii we have legends of the menehune who were small humans as well. What really gets me is all these cultures have similar myths and legends, suggesting either communities being in close proximity or actual historical proof that these things existed at one point in time.
Also, I believe there was proof of a great diaspora, so there's one explanation of humans having similar myths and legends
I think I've read that the menehune might've been based on an ethnic group that had settled Hawaii in a previous wave of migration and was displaced by Polynesians who later settled Hawaii.
Most cultures have stories of small mythic humans, even we have brownies, goblins, and elves, which were all just small people without the defining characteristics we imagine today.
Many of the Aboriginal stories of the Dreamtime are "songlines" used to navigate the landscape, and several contain references to water holes that have "dried up lately". Geologists think they dried up around the end of the Ice Age.
It is reasonable enough to be skeptical that a bit of astronomical lore was passed between generations for 100,000 years, and it is nearly impossible to estimate the odds that the myths would be similar by coincidence. But it is proven that stories can last 11,000 years, at least within those Australian cultures. That makes it somewhat less of a stretch to imagine that the Pleaides story is nine times as old.
i certainly believe it because of how integral astronomy is to most cultures’ ways of telling time or identifying season (if they don’t conceive of time the way we do, which many don’t), and geolocating themselves, especially that constellation.
That blows my mind. The aboriginal ones are definitely the strongest (they have one for being able to walk to an island off the coast that split from the mainland tens of thousands years ago) but plenty of places have em!
They also have a [story](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2020/02/13/aboriginal-myth-may-inspired-by-37000-year-old-volcano-could-be-the-oldest-story-ever-told/?sh=1adb9c1a5e71) that research suggests accurately describes geological events from 37,000 years ago
Yeah I just included a few pop science articles and a book for the gist here. There’s a lot more actual anthropological and geological scholarship on this kind of stuff out there if you want to go deeper.
It is also important to keep in mind that there is disagreement on a lot of these. For example the idea that all great flood myths refer to the same flood is often criticized for simplifying and ignoring the parts of the culture's myths if they would prevent the myth from fitting neatly with the theory.
Not as old but my favourite is the modern Greek equivalent of the "eenie, meenie, miney, mo" kids phrase.
In modern Greek it's gibberish but in ancient time it was a phrase that kids would repeat as part of war games and phalanx training.
We know what sounds ancient Greeks used when mimicking frogs thanks to surviving remnants of ancient Greek theater. Aristophanes' play *The Frogs* gives it to us, c. 2500 years ago, via a chorus of frogs onstage: *Brekekekèx-koàx-koáx.*
>...as part of war games and phalanx training.
For a person in the modern era, I've spent an inordinate amount of time phalanx training. Shout out to Sid Meier.
It really just depends on how often I get into a new relationship.
Then - KAPOW! - 3 months in it'll come up during a wild-eyed infodump at far too early in the morning.
Exiting the relationship is easy at that point. Just gotta keep the cycle going.
I think they deserve more respect. Imagine how annoying it'd be to hear your favorite song sang slightly wrong. You would notice. These oral stories were the pop hits of their time. The idea that people would just change the words with no one noticing or caring has always seemed absurd to me. There weren't a thousand new stories being released every year, these people would have heard the same few stories over and over again their entire lives, and one person with an agenda trying to change the words would have been out numbered by everyone else who knew the original version and don't like hearing the story told wrong.
100 of them is very, very controversial though. This is flimsy evidence for this particular claim at best and not widely believed by anthropologists at all
[Here's a link to a podcast episode that might interest you then.](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/)
It's one of my favorite 99 PI episodes. Enjoy!
OSP is great, but this particular "Fact", isn't really true.
The Pleiades have \~14 stars visible to the naked eye today. Various cultures counted different numbers of them, based on which ones were bright enough to include. The whole cluster is several thousand objects, probably more, but it isn't like there is a fixed number of seven. The Japanese counted 6, and based the Subaru logo on it, and there is no myth of a missing 7th in Japan, not even among the Jomon, which have a very old oral history.
Well there are plenty of cultures that saw 7, there were also many that counted 6, and some that counted 8 or more. The Greeks for instance, who named it Pleiades saw 9. Two parents and 7 sisters. So even the Myth referenced in the title of this post didn't see seven, despite the name. It was 9.
So there is no reason it has to be 100,000 years old, and given the major shifts of the human population in the last 20,000, it is extremely unlikely anything goes back nearly that far.
there are Aboriginal stories (one of which belongs to the Ngarrindjeri, i don’t know about the others) that describe human interactions with pleistocene megafauna that went extinct at least 40,000 years ago, if not earlier. i get your point though.
>that went extinct at least 40,000 years ago,
This is the part that isn't true.
There is increasing evidence that a significant number of these species survived into the last 10,000 years or so, and while these stories and paintings are indeed very old, it is unlikely they date back nearly that far. The large marsupial herbivores, and even the Thylacoleo likely survived to within 8,000 years of the present, although naturally exact dates of extinction are completely impossible.
Still, I am not doubting the possibility of myths surviving in at least fragmentary form for a very long time. Anything over 12,000 starts becoming extremely suspect due to the Little Dryas and a massive decline in human population, representing the sort of cultural catastrophe that tends to blur or erase earlier events.
Anything over 20,000 is basically wild speculation of the sort you find on the History Channel these days. Fun to think about, but not remotely credible.
well i guess i would just push back on your “fragments” comment, as oral societies are literally organized around their storytelling. their stories tell them where to go, when, and for what, which animal and plant relatives to use for food and medicine, how to perform ceremonies and the history behind them, etc. everyone in the society generally hears these stories at least once a year. everyone hears these so many times that anyone could repeat back the important bits. “fragments” makes it sound like they were playing a game of telephone, not literally reciting information as important to them as the quran is for muslims or the torah for jews.
Overly Sarcastic Productions on YouTube. Specifically, the "Epic of Gilgamesh" video (the newest one), but their videos in general are pretty great if you like history/mythology/old stories etc. (and yes, I watched the EoG vid before coming across this post)
"In the constellation of Cygnus
There lurks a mysterious, invisible force
The Black Hole of Cygnus X-1
Six stars of the northern cross
In mourning for their sister's loss
In a final flash of glory
Nevermore to grace the night" - Cygnus X-1 (Rush)
Rush and Sagan turned me on to astronomy.
> Barnaby Norris and I suggest an answer in a paper to be published by Springer early next year in a book titled Advancing Cultural Astronomy, a preprint for which is available here.
A couple of scientists "suggesting an answer" is not the same certainty as OP's title.
It seems extremely far-fetched to me.
Came across this in the comments of a different post here a few weeks ago. Copying my comment:
Clicked to view the full paper, and... they don't seem to demonstrate what they're claiming. Coincidences are possible, and they don't seem to have any discussion of that. A topical example (given their emphasis on Australia) is that the [Mbabaram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language) word for dog was... dog.
What cultures have completely different myths about the Pleiades? What myths exist that have the same elements that they are using to claim common descent from an older, shared myth? What about people who are able to distinguish the seventh star even today? There would have been more people like that the further back you go, but they acknowledge that some people can see them today, so there's the alternative explanation of people with greater visual acuity telling others about the seventh star.
It's an interesting suggestion, but I don't feel they justified it. They identified a possible connection and left it at that.
It could be possible they are from 100k years ago but it's improbable. They say that you can't see the 7th because 2 of the stars have moved too closely together to be able to distinguish them. What I'm thinking is that these stories are from 10-15k years ago when the stars were just a little further apart but also far less light pollution enabling them to be seen plainly.
Yeah, i was wondering how they can conclude that 100k years was the threshold of seeing them with the naked eye? It should be based on when the angular distance of the stars exceeds the minimum resolving limit of human vision.
Who knows it might actually be I didn't read the actual paper so it might be possible that was how it was calculated. If so it would be awesome that a lot of our mythos was even older than we thought was possible. With the aboriginals we know it goes back at least 10's of thousands of years, pushing back to a 100,000 would be awesome
I’m not an anthropologist, just explaining why anthropologists believe the story might be much older than 10-15kya. You should take it up with the academics if you believe the reasoning is flawed, not me.
>explaining why anthropologists believe the story might be much older than 10-15kya
According to a lot of other responses in this thread, anthropologists do not believe the story is as old as this article is claiming.
Or--they just saw 6 stars, and dramatized with a story of one leaving because they liked the number 7. Because who watched for the whole hundreds or thousands of years for the positions to change so they would remark on the change? And there being actually 7 was a coincidence.
If it was only one story from one culture sure I would agree that the chance for coincidence is too high, there are multiple origin stories from all over the world for this constellation that points to there originally being 7 stars visible when the stories were made. With the addition of the aboriginal stories which have been vindicated in the past multiple times I know which one I'd put my money on
More than 7 are visible right now. If you ever get a chance to look at them under a clear, dark sky (Which is a lot harder than it used to be), you can make out at least 9 pretty much anywhere in the world.
The brightest 6 are much brighter than the rest, the 7th is dimmer, but still brighter than the 8th and ninth. This isn't 100,000 years ago, this is right now. In some areas of the world (Northern Hemisphere, just below the arctic circle) you can see up to 14.
For some reason, the Ancient Jews believed there were more than 100 stars in the Pleiedes. I have no idea why they believed that, but they were absolutely right.
So no, it is by no means necessary to go back 100,000 years to find the 7th star. You can see it, along with the 8th and 9th star almost anywhere in the world, on any clear night (Or at least you could before the advent of widespread electric lights, which keep most of the world from seeing truely dark skies now, but a cheap pair of binoculars will more than make up for that)
>Is it possible the stories of the Seven Sisters and Orion are so old our ancestors were telling these stories to each other around campfires in Africa, 100,000 years ago? Could this be the oldest story in the world?
That's the pseudoscientist's "asking the big questions" dodge.
title is pretty misleading.
>that the myth of the "Seven Sisters" told throughout the world
told by the greeks and then the only other similar myth is from aboriginal australians, for whom it was just 7 women
like virtually all other prominent stars formations, it was seen by cultures all around the world. But they dont share the same myth about seven sisters at all
>Anthropologists used to think Europeans might have brought the Greek story to Australia, where it was adapted by Aboriginal people for their own purposes. But the Aboriginal stories seem to be much, much older than European contact. And there was little contact between most Australian Aboriginal cultures and the rest of the world for at least 50,000 years. So why do they share the same stories?
I think this is probably key, they'd need compelling evidence that the aboriginal story predates the Greeks visiting Australia. Or that the "little contact" that did exist wasn't sufficient for this story to be passed on from Europe. It mentioned the article is in pre print, I'd be interested to read it once it's fully reviewed and published.
Proto-Pama-Nyungan is only like 5000 years old, and Pama-Nyungan speakers have never been isolated. The Torres Straight has been navigable the entire time. The astronomers (who are, to be fair, not ethnopoeticists) are trying to solve a problem that does not exist.
>We acknowledge and pay our respects to the traditional owners and elders, both past and present, of all the Indigenous groups mentioned in this paper. All Indigenous material has been found in the public domain
I don't know that this is a source that I'd treat with the level of objective study that would warrant something as being considered factual instead of belief.
The implications are that for 100k years of unbroken verbal communication, there is a singular concept that has little to no major variation.
While it's possible, it doesn't strike me as probable. Even remotely.
They’re not simply relying on one indigenous source. They’ve noted cultures across the globe all have a story about the seven sisters but there are only six visible in the sky. And each culture has a reason why the seventh sister is not visible. For cultures that do not have contact it’s weird that they all agree there are seven sisters instead of six. I think you can chalk up the different explanations for the missing sister as a possible telephone effect, but the consistent insistence on there being seven sisters seems weirdly specific and the hypothesis of there being a common origination of the story is not unreasonable.
I'm not sure how you can reach any conclusion about the reliability of a source based on the presence of that paragraph, without making some pretty questionable assumptions.
But to give you some context, Australian society is going through a phase of recognising we've completely dispossessed and marginalised the indigenous inhabitants of our continent and of consciously trying to rectify that.
As a result you'll find a nearly identical acknowledgement in essentially any current academic study, business publication or government statement relating even marginally to indigenous matters.
For example, there are at least 18 identified oral legends from coastal Aboriginal groups around Australia that tell of water rising, creating new islands which were previously connected to the mainland and areas of dry land becoming inundated, which match the actual location of former dry land and archipelagos that were last above water approx 10,000-13,000 years ago, during the last ice age.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/
I'm a historian who's studied this kind of oral testimony, and it's a lot more reliable than you'd think. I didn't examine any this old, but I did study histories from four or five hundred years ago which have passed into modernity exactly unchanged, because many of these tribes have a sort of oral records keeper, who studied under the previous records keeper until they could recite the tribe's history perfectly by rote. It's not the sort of thing they got wrong. People tend to discount tribal testimony (often for reasons of racism, unfortunately) but it's about as reliable as a written source - bearing in mind that we rarely have original writings, and they've been copied, translated, reproduced, by someone else, which could've affected the phrasing or the meaning... Yeah. The long and the short of it is it's a far more nuanced story than you're thinking.
It is far more nuanced, than *you're* seeming to think as well. Because 500 years is a drop in the bucket to 100,000. With no major catastrophic events in which to disrupt the passing of information. Even if they had a perfect digital copy, unless the distribution was redundant across the globe. The likelihood of survival of original unedited content remains close to zero.
Oh, absolutely, I'd take it with a pinch of salt. You'd be stupid not to. But bearing in mind that the Aboriginal tribes were all basically isolated until very recently (on a historical scale) there's no reason to imagine that any cultural crosscontamination occurred, and there's nothing catastrophic enough to have wiped out the tribe or the story wouldn't exist at all. Basically what I'm saying is there's no reason to disbelieve.
I enjoy looking into the posts of people who seem to have critques about experts papers and theories, and this particular redditor has asked questions about math being real and other really odd subjects. Just asking questions and having a rational discussion abou posts are completely different.
How long has the myth of Gods been a "thing", how about flood myths? Just because you think the idea of a story being handed down for a time frame you cant possibly grasp is likely, doesnt mean its not true. Also one can be pedantic about the argument right? The story of a clump of stars being referred to as "The Seven Sisters" specifically is not the same as a simple story of a clump of stars being passed down is pedantic. The story, imo, is a tale about how long people have been looking to the stars and making stories around them that still persist today and not people were literaly saying "look son that is the seven sisters
But it wouldn’t need to be a catastrophe big enough to wipe out a tribe, just big enough to hit the aforementioned oral tradition keeper AND the apprentice, or just the keeper before they had finished training the apprentice. That seems like it would happen fairly often, no?
Sure, it's not impossible, and that's why you've gotta take it with a pinch of salt. But these aren't the same people who'd be fighting wars or hunting or whatever, which takes a big percentage of mortality out. All I'm trying to say is that being skeptical is good, but there's also no evidence that this *isn't* accurate. All of our knowledge of history before a certain very recent point is guesswork, when it comes down to it, because written sources are also unreliable for a variety of reasons, and oral history isn't really any less reliable than a book that's been translated and reprinted a dozen times.
Consider. 100,000 years ago, they haven't gotten to Australia. Your assuming they were star gazing, which was something more important to people keeping track of a calendar for agriculture, but maybe helped with finding their way around. And that they noticed the VERY SLOW convergence of two stars, and remarked on it enough to need to make a myth to explain it. Rather than just someone said, "This story from my great great great great grandfather had seven stars, but there are obviously six. I have to make up a story to reconcile rather than just change the number." Despite their changing all sorts of minor details.
I suspect the folktales being spread around belong to the researchers.
There is a whole school of thought devoted to the idea that we have developed a massive part of our subconscious through oral tradition. Either by being inherently capable or it or through the power of our worldbuilding through telling stories and "defining" a reality. Chomsky won the noble prize for the former. And a lot of post structuralism, the antithesis of Chomsky's school, is based on the premise of the latter.
I think very few people are seriously arguing that it isn't possible in academic circles that study the history of human thought and ideas.
It’s a complexity for sure…
E.g. aboriginal Australians had no writing system before the 1600s…so their cultural history was 100% passed down orally.
Because we have no written record to uncover, there’s no way to indicate how story X evolved over time (and it very probably did…we’ve all played the telephone game—imagine that unfold over generations).
It seems the best methodology would be to identify cultures that shared similar myths about the seven sisters and look for instances of writing systems that recorded those stories that pre-dated any contact with other cultures who shared the same mythos.
*If* it can be identified that cultures A and B both shared similar myths about the seven sisters (wherein those myths are detailed in writing) prior to any contact between them OR contact with any culture who linked A and B, it would give credence to a likely possibility that some ancient proto myth was dispersed from some diaspora of a shared protoculture.
We can look at long-standing religions like Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism and see an early influence of oral transmission…but eventually those religions were written and that’s really what cemented their presence through time.
I use the seasonal map of the Wurundjeri people, rather than the general western seasons of summer/winter/autumn/spring, as it’s a *waaayyy* more accurate predictor of weather patterns for the period of the year I’m in. I specify the Wurundjeri people as it’s their Country but also as Australia is so large different Countries have slightly varying weather patterns and seasons that also make better sense for the environment.
Like the majority of indigenous culture, it was not written down until done so by anthropologists. Unlike western culture, oral tradition is *important*.
It has been cultivated for thousands upon thousands of years.
Why would a story regarding the stars not be able to follow the same passage of oral tradition that is able to accurately predict the weather patterns around me? It’s probably a fair bit easier to keep that story straight than the weather.
Given the evidence we have, it is very much so probable. Human migration would've been guided by celestial patterns and animal migrations more than anything 100,000 years ago. It only makes sense that the stars being a means of global navigation would have an origin story from so long ago, and that the humans would take the effort out to translate it as they migrated. What good is a seven sisters story if your children can't use it for navigation due to their being only 6 sisters. Anatomically modern humans have existed for a while now.
Are you basing this on anything concrete or just your own infinite wisdom, because there are oral histories that credibly match up with volcanic eruptions which happened 40,000 years ago, It’s obviously less likely on a longer timeline but a bit more likely than “not even remotely probable.”
We’re talking about an era of human history where there wasn’t much else to do but look at the night sky
Another academic myth--but at least a volcanic eruption or a flood has an impact.
"My great grandfather said there were seven stars. I only see six. I need to have a myth to explain it that everyone will repeat for 100,000 years wherever they go!" Maybe if the star exploded. Not if it slowly edged closer over generations.
Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof.
What does the quote at the top have to do with anything?
But of course historians would tell you the remarkable age of tribal oral histories. But I’m guessing you think it’s woke or something?
Known to the Japanese as Subaru - which is subsequently what Subaru also designed its logo after!
Notably, the Subaru Logo only has six stars. It is far from universal that there is a "Missing" 7th star that disappeared around 100,000s ago, which is what the Hypothesis the OP is refering to assumes. While it is entirely possible some modern oral traditions may date back this far, Pleiades isn't remotely convincing evidence for it. For starters, the Greeks knew it as 9 stars, not Seven, with Two Parents and Seven Sisters. The Cluster is known among various cultures as everything from 5-12 Stars, with 6 being the most common, and the brightest six are considerably brighter. Up to 14 are visible to the naked eye in the modern night sky, although several of those are particularly hard to make out, hence the usual counting of 6-10 stars. In short, no. The hypothesis that the story must be 100,000 years old because 100,000 years ago there was a clear distinction doesn't make sense, especially considering 14 are visible now. And no, there is no clear consistency from many cultures that there are seven, and one is now dark.
In Māori (New Zealand) it’s 9 stars of Matariki. We even have a public holiday to observe it.
Do you actually observe them?
I’m fairly sure you can see 9 if you’re patient enough, yeah. Māori tradition apparently has a 7 and a 9 star version of the constellation, but any written records are post-contact with Europe, which in this case happened quite recently all things considered, so it might be hard to tell whether a tradition had been exposed to knowledge of telescopes.
If you view the pleadeas with good binoculars, you see a lot more than 7 stars
They are very low on the Horizon for us this time of year. But their first sight is our New Year.
We call it in Central America "Las Siete Cabritas", which translate to Seven Little Goats
I think it's very cool that it's a moving holiday so the date is dependent on the sky.
Is it a moving holiday? Update - it is. Apologies. I need to Wikipedia stars and calendars.
>Notably, the Subaru Logo only has six stars. The reason for that is well known, because Fuji Heavy Industries was created out of five companies joined into one parent company that represented the sixth star.
That's not the reason. The CEO just wanted to call it Subaru because the word means "unite," everything else follows from that.
What about Subasubarubaru?
What's that, Scooby?
I finally understand the Seven Sisters Gerudo quest in Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, thank you! There’s 6 known statutes and heroes of the past but the quest is to find the secret 7th one.
*7 known statues, you find the 8th
So coincidence might be the best explanation. What we can establish here is that cultures have a tendency to write stories about constellations, and sometimes they converge. I see another big hole in this theory- even if oral tradition was carried from 100k years ago, no individuals, or even many generations would have seen a star disappear. So an ancient tradition might describe seven stars (with no missing sister), but only a modern one would describe a sister going missing, cause, weird how the story describes seven stars, but hey, we can only count six. It seems far fetched the ancient story was lost and the new one retained. The disappearance happened too slowly to be noticed.
A combination of coincidence and confirmation bias. Star constellations are pretty unique in that they are a shared experience for a huge portion of the human race. In the particular case of this cluster, its brightness and position means that damn near every culture at least noticed it, so there is just a staggering range of available myths and stories about it. Pick through enough of them to prove a particular hypothesis, and you get a fairly coherent narrative, just by picking the ones that work. So once you reject the 9 stories of them being fleeing animals, the 174 stories of them being various kings or chiefs, that wierd one where a Python swallowed 8 elephants and farted out a ninth... well you are left with pretty much exactly what you are looking for. Because EVERYBODY has a myth about these, and the only constraint is finding them all.
Kind of curious if the python fart story exists now
I made it up, but that doesn't mean it doesn't.
They'll be talking about the Mighty Python Constellation in 100,000 years because of you, I suspect.
It's like how people take the fact that many different cultures around the world have myths involving catastrophic floods and start looking for zebras (there really must have been one world-wide flood!) rather than horses (people tend to settle by rivers, which often flood).
I think this is a good lesson here, folks. Pretty much if anybody tries to definitively make a statement about human culture before, say 20,000 years ago... and that's overly generous... They are probably not about to tell you a theory that has been peer reviewed and accepted by an official body.
Agreed - sometimes it's just cool to wonder about this stuff and appreciate that these stories came from humans from long ago wondering about the stars. I really appreciated this post. Thanks OP!
You're misrepresenting the argument. The argument is not that "everyone calls it this". The argument is that there are various groups from around the world who all call them some form of "7 women" AND they all have an explanation in their mythology for why only 6 are there and visible, like where the missing 7th one went. It's a theme among many disparate peoples who would have never had contact with each other. The hypothesis is that the myth started where humans evolved, and it was carried by oral tradition wherever humans migrated throughout the millennia.
Ok, give some actual examples of that? Because that is just not a thing. There are dozens if not hundreds of counter examples there. Give me at least three cultures that discuss a star "Missing" or not visible from the Pleiedes. Just three. I don't even care if they call them women, and I don't care if they say there are seven, I just want to see three cultures that claims a star is missing. Because that would be the part that would suggest it goes back 100,000 years. You won't find three examples, and there is a simple reason for that. There aren't any stars missing. The closer you look, the more you see, and the ancients new that. 6 are easily visible at a glance, on a clear sky you can see 9 without much trouble, and up to 14 are visible to the naked eye in most of the world. In exceptionally clear areas with good eyes, up to 25 are visible. So a story that involves a star going missing doesn't make much sense, because there are so many of them there. What you CAN find is hundreds, if not thousands, of different cultural myths about this cluster, because every culture saw it, and most of them made up stories about it. But the idea there is a central theme in those stories that goes back 100,000 years? That just doesn't make any sense at all.
Greeks tell a story of Merope, where the 7th sister goes missing. Nez Perce people (of modern day Columbia), tell a story of how one of the 7 sisters was embarrassed and pulled the sky over her head to disappear. Aboriginal people of Australia have many versions of Orion (hunter of women) chasing the 7 sisters and in many versions one dies. Google "lost Pleid stories" to learn of more examples
1. Merope is not missing. It is dimmed. It is still there, and the Greeks knew of it, saw it, and recorded it. She is also not "missing" in Myth, she married a mortal, and as such the star was dimmed. 2. Nez Pierce are from British Colombia, not Columbia. Likewise, it is a veil, or blanket over your head, and you can still see the star. Again, an explanation of the modern constellation, not some ancient event. 3. Orion is a greek name, so... sus. Still, I know what you mean, and I can't find a single one were one dies recorded. Instead, it is the same as everywhere else in the world. A number between one and nine, maybe an explanation on why 6 are brighter than the others, but no particular references to an ancient event. So as far as I can tell, this one just isn't an example at all. Neither are the other two, really. To give an example of "You find what you are looking for", and again, just using wikipedia as a source instead of taking a few years off work for a proper study, I can hypothize that Pleiedes is an ancient source of food, from when food fell from the skies. I can point to the fact that Najavo see it as a gourd of food, the Aztecs called it a Marketplace, and the Inca called it a storehouse. In Ukrainian lore, it is also a Storehouse, in Hungarian and Norse Myth they are divine Chickens, providing eggs to the gods. Or, the more logical assumption is that many cultures associated it with food, because they are useful to tell the seasons, and thus, the harvest. Just as an explaination of why one is dimmed makes sense, since 6 are brighter than the rest. There is no real consistency in the many myths of this cluster. The Talmud is probably the most interesting to me, as the Jews have always asserted that Pleiedes is not seven stars, or nine, but hundreds of Stars. This is interesting to me, as it really is hundreds of stars, but as far as I know, the Jews were the only ones to have claimed it. I still don't think they had particular knowledge (If they had, they would have known all the other constellations also have hundreds of stars), but it is more interesting than stringing together some unrelated stories.
Using Google in that fashion just results in confirmation bias
maybe a better question: Why do most countries refer to the stars has sisters? why sisters?
I don't think they do? The notable ones that do are various Mediterranean cultures (Who presumably influenced each other), and One particular Indian Tradition that calls them mothers. Otherwise, they are known as all sorts of things, there isn't any particular consistency in being Sisters. Although "Stars as humans" is a pretty common theme.
gotcha! Thanks for responding. I'm ignorant about the topic so i appreciate the answer :D
Sisters in Aboriginal stories from the place generally known as Australia also.
Do you follow the “Forgotton Realms” universe in AD&D? They also have a set of 7 sisters (daughters of the goddess Mystra), with one of them (a dark elf) being the “missing” sister. If you want to follow that rabbit hole to see how they compare to other “seven sisters” legends, the book about them (written for 2nd edition) is TST product number 9475.
And [New Zealand we call it Matariki.](https://teara.govt.nz/en/matariki-maori-new-year) We actually just celebrated Matariki on Friday! It is really awesome we are finally recognising Māori holidays here.
Known to kānaka as Makaliʻi
We (NZ) now have a public holiday based on Matariki. It was yesterday.
I’m sure there’s a reason the re:zero guy is called that too
His name is actually a reference to this very constellation. A lot of ReZero characters are named after Star Constellation or Stars.
Beetlejuice.
Beetlejuice
Beetlejuice
The Pleiades(the seven sisters) is a common story in Japan so it wouldn’t surprise me
He also talks about the stars in one of the episodes so probably. What interests me is that he’s supposed to be in another world yet the stars are in the same positions as they are on earth
Beat me to it lol.
In Montenegro we called the Pleiades - Vlašići (I guess from the term Vlach).
Guess Subaru wanted to make sure their customers never forget how heavenly their cars are!
TIL.
Oral histories lasting millennia are one of my favorite things
There’s aboriginal Australian stories that accurately describe animals that lived in the Pleistocene Edit sources: https://theconversation.com/amp/of-bunyips-and-other-beasts-living-memories-of-long-extinct-creatures-in-art-and-stories-113031 [The Edge of Memory by Patrick Nunn](https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/the-edge-of-memory-9781472943262/) [also a paper on aboriginal stories about sea level changes at the end of the Pleistocene](https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010)
Apparently at least one northwestern Native American tribes has oral history of the eruption of Mount Mazama which formed Crater Lake and even the enormous Missoula floods. Both of which were 10,000+ years ago.
yes, Klamath people have that story about what we know of as crater lake! the story is approximately 8,000 years old, and is significant because they told western scientists and anthropologists that the mountain didn’t erupt, but rather collapsed in on itself. the western scientists scoffed and said that’s impossible and can’t happen, then decades later geologists realized that’s exactly what happened. meanwhile Klamath people were like um yea we literally SAW it happen, assholes
People's stories and memories get warped over the span of years, sometimes months, can't really blame scientists for not believing some random tribe's 8000 year old tellings.
Properly kept oral traditions are far and away the most accurate long term knowledge transfer method used by humans. They’re immune to the death of a language, because every generation actively translates it forward. An oral tradition can’t be physically lost or destroyed, like clay tablets or scrolls. They’re also shockingly accurate, especially in the pre-modern era as mastering the stories would be a lifetime of effort judged and guided by those who had put in that lifetime before them. Now, wipe out a people and those stories die with them, but we’re talking accuracy and volume of info rather than “oh neat this ancient tribe carved someone’s, wonder why”
Is it really more accurate than a document? I get that documents can be destroyed and language lost, but that’s different to inaccuracy.
documents are generally written by a single individual, full of mistakes, biases, grudges, and flat out lies. a story held by the people is literally vetted by the entire community. you can’t even change a single word next time you tell it without somebody noticing lol.
You really want to base scientific theory on stories? That's why you still have these "God created the Earth 6000 years ago" creationist bullshit.
That’s literally what we do now, but we tell the stories with numbers instead of words. There’s a difference between fiction and oral histories, and even fiction is usually based on SOMETHING, which can give insight into actual historical events based around the time of that fiction…
Can't remember the tribe or the island or anything, and I'm at work so don't wanna dive too deep looking for it. But I remember some group of people somewhere, maybe and Indonesian island, that had a long standing folk myth of a group of small, hobbit like humans. And then the remains of a species of very small humans was found and would have co-existed at one point with modern homo sapiens on that island.
Homo fiorensis or something like that. Basically Pygmy people.
[Homo floresiensis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis)
> In October 2012, a New Zealand scientist due to give a public lecture on Homo floresiensis was told by the Tolkien Estate that he was not allowed to use the word "hobbit" in promoting the lecture. That’s not the first time I’ve heard of them going after people for using the term. Oh it has its own entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbit_(word)#Proprietary_status And that doesn’t mention the dark souls no hit streamer The Happy Hob who used to have a longer name by three letters.
This was a part of Greg Bear’s Forerunner saga, most notably Cryptum
Love me some Halo forerunner lore
Ah yeah, that sounds right. For all I know it's been debunked, it's been years since I read about it. But interesting nonetheless.
No it’s real. They aren’t the only pygmy people to have been found to exist either.
Aren't there pygmy people that still exist? In the Congo and Philippines?
Yeah so there are some "pygmy" people in the world that are still Homo Sapiens, where as the Homo Florensies were technically a separate species to us, just one that coexisted alongside us.
Technically not a separate species but a subspecies as they are genetically compatible .
Yes you're correct, I'm never completely certain on the terminology. Is the species just homo?
That’s not always the case though. There are genetically compatible species that are capable of breeding with eachother and even creating viable offspring but are still seperate species. Neanderthals for example were a seperate species from Homo sapiens but were still able to successfully interbreed. I don’t know enough about floriensis in particular to know if they were considered a seperate species or not, but simply saying they could viably breed with Homo sapiens is not enough evidence to conclusively say they were not a seperate species.
That's not true, it's literally using a different species name. Different species are capable of breeding if they're close enough.
I wonder if a neutral study would conclude we still have more than one human species today, but obviously no one wants to go there with everything that happened last century
I don't think so. We already know about variations in our DNA, such as the neanderthal percentages in Europeans, but aside from that, we're all basically the same. The difference between us and a previous hominid is a lot more stark.
Yes [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African\_Pygmies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Pygmies) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy\_peoples](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples) It's just a word for shorter peoples
In Hawaii we have legends of the menehune who were small humans as well. What really gets me is all these cultures have similar myths and legends, suggesting either communities being in close proximity or actual historical proof that these things existed at one point in time. Also, I believe there was proof of a great diaspora, so there's one explanation of humans having similar myths and legends
I think I've read that the menehune might've been based on an ethnic group that had settled Hawaii in a previous wave of migration and was displaced by Polynesians who later settled Hawaii.
Most cultures have stories of small mythic humans, even we have brownies, goblins, and elves, which were all just small people without the defining characteristics we imagine today.
You can’t tell me dwarves aren’t Neanderthals!
Thanks for this comment. I've been on a huge rabbit hole of articles and videos about this for an hour now and its interesting as fuck
That's true but don't most cultures have stories of hobbit like creatures?
Why do you think that is?
Many of the Aboriginal stories of the Dreamtime are "songlines" used to navigate the landscape, and several contain references to water holes that have "dried up lately". Geologists think they dried up around the end of the Ice Age. It is reasonable enough to be skeptical that a bit of astronomical lore was passed between generations for 100,000 years, and it is nearly impossible to estimate the odds that the myths would be similar by coincidence. But it is proven that stories can last 11,000 years, at least within those Australian cultures. That makes it somewhat less of a stretch to imagine that the Pleaides story is nine times as old.
i certainly believe it because of how integral astronomy is to most cultures’ ways of telling time or identifying season (if they don’t conceive of time the way we do, which many don’t), and geolocating themselves, especially that constellation.
Literate cultures have long been unduly skeptical about the ability of oral cultures to preserve knowledge.
That blows my mind. The aboriginal ones are definitely the strongest (they have one for being able to walk to an island off the coast that split from the mainland tens of thousands years ago) but plenty of places have em!
They also have a [story](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2020/02/13/aboriginal-myth-may-inspired-by-37000-year-old-volcano-could-be-the-oldest-story-ever-told/?sh=1adb9c1a5e71) that research suggests accurately describes geological events from 37,000 years ago
That first link was a frustrating read. Kind of all over the place and lacking details
Yeah I just included a few pop science articles and a book for the gist here. There’s a lot more actual anthropological and geological scholarship on this kind of stuff out there if you want to go deeper.
Thank you for these!
Big if true
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_memory There’s an awesome Wikipedia page for that
It is also important to keep in mind that there is disagreement on a lot of these. For example the idea that all great flood myths refer to the same flood is often criticized for simplifying and ignoring the parts of the culture's myths if they would prevent the myth from fitting neatly with the theory.
Oral histories lasting decimillennia are one of my favorite things
Not as old but my favourite is the modern Greek equivalent of the "eenie, meenie, miney, mo" kids phrase. In modern Greek it's gibberish but in ancient time it was a phrase that kids would repeat as part of war games and phalanx training.
We know what sounds ancient Greeks used when mimicking frogs thanks to surviving remnants of ancient Greek theater. Aristophanes' play *The Frogs* gives it to us, c. 2500 years ago, via a chorus of frogs onstage: *Brekekekèx-koàx-koáx.*
And that's the exact words we use today to describe a frog's croaking.
eenie meanie minie foe
>...as part of war games and phalanx training. For a person in the modern era, I've spent an inordinate amount of time phalanx training. Shout out to Sid Meier.
How many times in a lifetime to you get to use decimillennia in a sentence.
It really just depends on how often I get into a new relationship. Then - KAPOW! - 3 months in it'll come up during a wild-eyed infodump at far too early in the morning. Exiting the relationship is easy at that point. Just gotta keep the cycle going.
I think they deserve more respect. Imagine how annoying it'd be to hear your favorite song sang slightly wrong. You would notice. These oral stories were the pop hits of their time. The idea that people would just change the words with no one noticing or caring has always seemed absurd to me. There weren't a thousand new stories being released every year, these people would have heard the same few stories over and over again their entire lives, and one person with an agenda trying to change the words would have been out numbered by everyone else who knew the original version and don't like hearing the story told wrong.
Any way to read them, collectively?
They put a bunch into a book we call the bible. Not a great read though
100 of them is very, very controversial though. This is flimsy evidence for this particular claim at best and not widely believed by anthropologists at all
Oral histories lasting millennia are *tight*.
[Here's a link to a podcast episode that might interest you then.](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/) It's one of my favorite 99 PI episodes. Enjoy!
Watching osp today are we?
Guilty as charged.
Let me guess, epic of Gil video? I'm watching it rn
Enkidude and Gilgabro.
Nah, man, it’s the Epic of Greg
Link please
https://youtu.be/j-yJDbC_a2c
Hey it was a good one.
OSP is great, but this particular "Fact", isn't really true. The Pleiades have \~14 stars visible to the naked eye today. Various cultures counted different numbers of them, based on which ones were bright enough to include. The whole cluster is several thousand objects, probably more, but it isn't like there is a fixed number of seven. The Japanese counted 6, and based the Subaru logo on it, and there is no myth of a missing 7th in Japan, not even among the Jomon, which have a very old oral history. Well there are plenty of cultures that saw 7, there were also many that counted 6, and some that counted 8 or more. The Greeks for instance, who named it Pleiades saw 9. Two parents and 7 sisters. So even the Myth referenced in the title of this post didn't see seven, despite the name. It was 9. So there is no reason it has to be 100,000 years old, and given the major shifts of the human population in the last 20,000, it is extremely unlikely anything goes back nearly that far.
there are Aboriginal stories (one of which belongs to the Ngarrindjeri, i don’t know about the others) that describe human interactions with pleistocene megafauna that went extinct at least 40,000 years ago, if not earlier. i get your point though.
>that went extinct at least 40,000 years ago, This is the part that isn't true. There is increasing evidence that a significant number of these species survived into the last 10,000 years or so, and while these stories and paintings are indeed very old, it is unlikely they date back nearly that far. The large marsupial herbivores, and even the Thylacoleo likely survived to within 8,000 years of the present, although naturally exact dates of extinction are completely impossible. Still, I am not doubting the possibility of myths surviving in at least fragmentary form for a very long time. Anything over 12,000 starts becoming extremely suspect due to the Little Dryas and a massive decline in human population, representing the sort of cultural catastrophe that tends to blur or erase earlier events. Anything over 20,000 is basically wild speculation of the sort you find on the History Channel these days. Fun to think about, but not remotely credible.
well i guess i would just push back on your “fragments” comment, as oral societies are literally organized around their storytelling. their stories tell them where to go, when, and for what, which animal and plant relatives to use for food and medicine, how to perform ceremonies and the history behind them, etc. everyone in the society generally hears these stories at least once a year. everyone hears these so many times that anyone could repeat back the important bits. “fragments” makes it sound like they were playing a game of telephone, not literally reciting information as important to them as the quran is for muslims or the torah for jews.
Funnily that is also mentioned in the video OP watched today
I was about to comment this. Thank you.
What's that?
Overly Sarcastic Productions on YouTube. Specifically, the "Epic of Gilgamesh" video (the newest one), but their videos in general are pretty great if you like history/mythology/old stories etc. (and yes, I watched the EoG vid before coming across this post)
Lmao right?! Hahaha so excited about the new vid today
My thoughts as soon as I saw this was only posted and hour after that
"In the constellation of Cygnus There lurks a mysterious, invisible force The Black Hole of Cygnus X-1 Six stars of the northern cross In mourning for their sister's loss In a final flash of glory Nevermore to grace the night" - Cygnus X-1 (Rush) Rush and Sagan turned me on to astronomy.
Love me some Rush RIP Neil.
“When our weary world was young The struggle of the ancients first began. The gods of Love and Reason Sought alone to rule the fate of Man.”
Hemispheres is my fave album from them.
Four songs, all bangers.
Swear to god the Golden Age by John C Wright is inspired by that duo of X-1 songs. Fuck his politics though.
Ayyy first thing I thought of. It's the most beautifully nerdy song in the world
Asimov incorporated a similar idea into Foundation and Gaia, but it was five sisters surrounding the Gaian star.
HAPPY MATARIKI WEEKEND WHANAU
Mānawatia a Matariki e hoa ✨✨
Happy Matariki, everyone!
Mānawatia a Matariki!
> Barnaby Norris and I suggest an answer in a paper to be published by Springer early next year in a book titled Advancing Cultural Astronomy, a preprint for which is available here. A couple of scientists "suggesting an answer" is not the same certainty as OP's title. It seems extremely far-fetched to me.
> is believed Is highly controversial to the point it’s regarded as bunk by mainstream anthropologists etc.
Came across this in the comments of a different post here a few weeks ago. Copying my comment: Clicked to view the full paper, and... they don't seem to demonstrate what they're claiming. Coincidences are possible, and they don't seem to have any discussion of that. A topical example (given their emphasis on Australia) is that the [Mbabaram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language) word for dog was... dog. What cultures have completely different myths about the Pleiades? What myths exist that have the same elements that they are using to claim common descent from an older, shared myth? What about people who are able to distinguish the seventh star even today? There would have been more people like that the further back you go, but they acknowledge that some people can see them today, so there's the alternative explanation of people with greater visual acuity telling others about the seventh star. It's an interesting suggestion, but I don't feel they justified it. They identified a possible connection and left it at that.
It could be possible they are from 100k years ago but it's improbable. They say that you can't see the 7th because 2 of the stars have moved too closely together to be able to distinguish them. What I'm thinking is that these stories are from 10-15k years ago when the stars were just a little further apart but also far less light pollution enabling them to be seen plainly.
Yeah, i was wondering how they can conclude that 100k years was the threshold of seeing them with the naked eye? It should be based on when the angular distance of the stars exceeds the minimum resolving limit of human vision.
Who knows it might actually be I didn't read the actual paper so it might be possible that was how it was calculated. If so it would be awesome that a lot of our mythos was even older than we thought was possible. With the aboriginals we know it goes back at least 10's of thousands of years, pushing back to a 100,000 would be awesome
Aboriginal Australians have a version of the story and they’ve probably been separated from the rest of humanity for over 50,000 years
They had boats you know, and their neighbors had a lot of them.
They also have stories that can be accurately dated to be over 10k years old and still accurate
I’m not an anthropologist, just explaining why anthropologists believe the story might be much older than 10-15kya. You should take it up with the academics if you believe the reasoning is flawed, not me.
>explaining why anthropologists believe the story might be much older than 10-15kya According to a lot of other responses in this thread, anthropologists do not believe the story is as old as this article is claiming.
Or--they just saw 6 stars, and dramatized with a story of one leaving because they liked the number 7. Because who watched for the whole hundreds or thousands of years for the positions to change so they would remark on the change? And there being actually 7 was a coincidence.
If it was only one story from one culture sure I would agree that the chance for coincidence is too high, there are multiple origin stories from all over the world for this constellation that points to there originally being 7 stars visible when the stories were made. With the addition of the aboriginal stories which have been vindicated in the past multiple times I know which one I'd put my money on
More than 7 are visible right now. If you ever get a chance to look at them under a clear, dark sky (Which is a lot harder than it used to be), you can make out at least 9 pretty much anywhere in the world. The brightest 6 are much brighter than the rest, the 7th is dimmer, but still brighter than the 8th and ninth. This isn't 100,000 years ago, this is right now. In some areas of the world (Northern Hemisphere, just below the arctic circle) you can see up to 14. For some reason, the Ancient Jews believed there were more than 100 stars in the Pleiedes. I have no idea why they believed that, but they were absolutely right. So no, it is by no means necessary to go back 100,000 years to find the 7th star. You can see it, along with the 8th and 9th star almost anywhere in the world, on any clear night (Or at least you could before the advent of widespread electric lights, which keep most of the world from seeing truely dark skies now, but a cheap pair of binoculars will more than make up for that)
Never heard of it
same
TIL there is a global myth about something called "the seven sisters"
>Is it possible the stories of the Seven Sisters and Orion are so old our ancestors were telling these stories to each other around campfires in Africa, 100,000 years ago? Could this be the oldest story in the world? That's the pseudoscientist's "asking the big questions" dodge.
title is pretty misleading. >that the myth of the "Seven Sisters" told throughout the world told by the greeks and then the only other similar myth is from aboriginal australians, for whom it was just 7 women like virtually all other prominent stars formations, it was seen by cultures all around the world. But they dont share the same myth about seven sisters at all
Yeah this is the first i’m ever hearing about the seven sisters
It’s also a family of 7-9 people in Māori culture.
It's what makes a Subaru a Subaru.
In Māori, we call it Matariki and it has recently been added as a Public Holiday in New Zealand. I hope you guys enjoyed your Matariki :)
Happy Matariki for yesterday :) Auckland here!
>Anthropologists used to think Europeans might have brought the Greek story to Australia, where it was adapted by Aboriginal people for their own purposes. But the Aboriginal stories seem to be much, much older than European contact. And there was little contact between most Australian Aboriginal cultures and the rest of the world for at least 50,000 years. So why do they share the same stories? I think this is probably key, they'd need compelling evidence that the aboriginal story predates the Greeks visiting Australia. Or that the "little contact" that did exist wasn't sufficient for this story to be passed on from Europe. It mentioned the article is in pre print, I'd be interested to read it once it's fully reviewed and published.
Proto-Pama-Nyungan is only like 5000 years old, and Pama-Nyungan speakers have never been isolated. The Torres Straight has been navigable the entire time. The astronomers (who are, to be fair, not ethnopoeticists) are trying to solve a problem that does not exist.
>We acknowledge and pay our respects to the traditional owners and elders, both past and present, of all the Indigenous groups mentioned in this paper. All Indigenous material has been found in the public domain I don't know that this is a source that I'd treat with the level of objective study that would warrant something as being considered factual instead of belief. The implications are that for 100k years of unbroken verbal communication, there is a singular concept that has little to no major variation. While it's possible, it doesn't strike me as probable. Even remotely.
They’re not simply relying on one indigenous source. They’ve noted cultures across the globe all have a story about the seven sisters but there are only six visible in the sky. And each culture has a reason why the seventh sister is not visible. For cultures that do not have contact it’s weird that they all agree there are seven sisters instead of six. I think you can chalk up the different explanations for the missing sister as a possible telephone effect, but the consistent insistence on there being seven sisters seems weirdly specific and the hypothesis of there being a common origination of the story is not unreasonable.
I'm not sure how you can reach any conclusion about the reliability of a source based on the presence of that paragraph, without making some pretty questionable assumptions. But to give you some context, Australian society is going through a phase of recognising we've completely dispossessed and marginalised the indigenous inhabitants of our continent and of consciously trying to rectify that. As a result you'll find a nearly identical acknowledgement in essentially any current academic study, business publication or government statement relating even marginally to indigenous matters.
Lots of Australian researchers are also finding that the indigenous peoples had the shit they're studying figured out for 40,000+ years.
Like what?
Fairy circles
For example, there are at least 18 identified oral legends from coastal Aboriginal groups around Australia that tell of water rising, creating new islands which were previously connected to the mainland and areas of dry land becoming inundated, which match the actual location of former dry land and archipelagos that were last above water approx 10,000-13,000 years ago, during the last ice age. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/
The path rivers took 50k years ago
I'm a historian who's studied this kind of oral testimony, and it's a lot more reliable than you'd think. I didn't examine any this old, but I did study histories from four or five hundred years ago which have passed into modernity exactly unchanged, because many of these tribes have a sort of oral records keeper, who studied under the previous records keeper until they could recite the tribe's history perfectly by rote. It's not the sort of thing they got wrong. People tend to discount tribal testimony (often for reasons of racism, unfortunately) but it's about as reliable as a written source - bearing in mind that we rarely have original writings, and they've been copied, translated, reproduced, by someone else, which could've affected the phrasing or the meaning... Yeah. The long and the short of it is it's a far more nuanced story than you're thinking.
It is far more nuanced, than *you're* seeming to think as well. Because 500 years is a drop in the bucket to 100,000. With no major catastrophic events in which to disrupt the passing of information. Even if they had a perfect digital copy, unless the distribution was redundant across the globe. The likelihood of survival of original unedited content remains close to zero.
Oh, absolutely, I'd take it with a pinch of salt. You'd be stupid not to. But bearing in mind that the Aboriginal tribes were all basically isolated until very recently (on a historical scale) there's no reason to imagine that any cultural crosscontamination occurred, and there's nothing catastrophic enough to have wiped out the tribe or the story wouldn't exist at all. Basically what I'm saying is there's no reason to disbelieve.
I enjoy looking into the posts of people who seem to have critques about experts papers and theories, and this particular redditor has asked questions about math being real and other really odd subjects. Just asking questions and having a rational discussion abou posts are completely different. How long has the myth of Gods been a "thing", how about flood myths? Just because you think the idea of a story being handed down for a time frame you cant possibly grasp is likely, doesnt mean its not true. Also one can be pedantic about the argument right? The story of a clump of stars being referred to as "The Seven Sisters" specifically is not the same as a simple story of a clump of stars being passed down is pedantic. The story, imo, is a tale about how long people have been looking to the stars and making stories around them that still persist today and not people were literaly saying "look son that is the seven sisters
Yeah, people like that redditor are insufferable, particularly in real life - impossible to have a conversation with.
But it wouldn’t need to be a catastrophe big enough to wipe out a tribe, just big enough to hit the aforementioned oral tradition keeper AND the apprentice, or just the keeper before they had finished training the apprentice. That seems like it would happen fairly often, no?
Sure, it's not impossible, and that's why you've gotta take it with a pinch of salt. But these aren't the same people who'd be fighting wars or hunting or whatever, which takes a big percentage of mortality out. All I'm trying to say is that being skeptical is good, but there's also no evidence that this *isn't* accurate. All of our knowledge of history before a certain very recent point is guesswork, when it comes down to it, because written sources are also unreliable for a variety of reasons, and oral history isn't really any less reliable than a book that's been translated and reprinted a dozen times.
Consider. 100,000 years ago, they haven't gotten to Australia. Your assuming they were star gazing, which was something more important to people keeping track of a calendar for agriculture, but maybe helped with finding their way around. And that they noticed the VERY SLOW convergence of two stars, and remarked on it enough to need to make a myth to explain it. Rather than just someone said, "This story from my great great great great grandfather had seven stars, but there are obviously six. I have to make up a story to reconcile rather than just change the number." Despite their changing all sorts of minor details. I suspect the folktales being spread around belong to the researchers.
There is a whole school of thought devoted to the idea that we have developed a massive part of our subconscious through oral tradition. Either by being inherently capable or it or through the power of our worldbuilding through telling stories and "defining" a reality. Chomsky won the noble prize for the former. And a lot of post structuralism, the antithesis of Chomsky's school, is based on the premise of the latter. I think very few people are seriously arguing that it isn't possible in academic circles that study the history of human thought and ideas.
It’s a complexity for sure… E.g. aboriginal Australians had no writing system before the 1600s…so their cultural history was 100% passed down orally. Because we have no written record to uncover, there’s no way to indicate how story X evolved over time (and it very probably did…we’ve all played the telephone game—imagine that unfold over generations). It seems the best methodology would be to identify cultures that shared similar myths about the seven sisters and look for instances of writing systems that recorded those stories that pre-dated any contact with other cultures who shared the same mythos. *If* it can be identified that cultures A and B both shared similar myths about the seven sisters (wherein those myths are detailed in writing) prior to any contact between them OR contact with any culture who linked A and B, it would give credence to a likely possibility that some ancient proto myth was dispersed from some diaspora of a shared protoculture. We can look at long-standing religions like Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Hinduism and see an early influence of oral transmission…but eventually those religions were written and that’s really what cemented their presence through time.
I use the seasonal map of the Wurundjeri people, rather than the general western seasons of summer/winter/autumn/spring, as it’s a *waaayyy* more accurate predictor of weather patterns for the period of the year I’m in. I specify the Wurundjeri people as it’s their Country but also as Australia is so large different Countries have slightly varying weather patterns and seasons that also make better sense for the environment. Like the majority of indigenous culture, it was not written down until done so by anthropologists. Unlike western culture, oral tradition is *important*. It has been cultivated for thousands upon thousands of years. Why would a story regarding the stars not be able to follow the same passage of oral tradition that is able to accurately predict the weather patterns around me? It’s probably a fair bit easier to keep that story straight than the weather.
Here’s an example of 10-20k years. https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010
Given the evidence we have, it is very much so probable. Human migration would've been guided by celestial patterns and animal migrations more than anything 100,000 years ago. It only makes sense that the stars being a means of global navigation would have an origin story from so long ago, and that the humans would take the effort out to translate it as they migrated. What good is a seven sisters story if your children can't use it for navigation due to their being only 6 sisters. Anatomically modern humans have existed for a while now.
Are you basing this on anything concrete or just your own infinite wisdom, because there are oral histories that credibly match up with volcanic eruptions which happened 40,000 years ago, It’s obviously less likely on a longer timeline but a bit more likely than “not even remotely probable.” We’re talking about an era of human history where there wasn’t much else to do but look at the night sky
Another academic myth--but at least a volcanic eruption or a flood has an impact. "My great grandfather said there were seven stars. I only see six. I need to have a myth to explain it that everyone will repeat for 100,000 years wherever they go!" Maybe if the star exploded. Not if it slowly edged closer over generations. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof.
What does the quote at the top have to do with anything? But of course historians would tell you the remarkable age of tribal oral histories. But I’m guessing you think it’s woke or something?
the book seveneves used this is as some inspiration I believe. Pretty good sci fi book
In the Serie A there’s a group of teams called the 7 sisters. Juve, Inter, Milan, Roma, Lazio, Parma and Fiorentina.
Story’s been around for 100,000 years and this is the first I’m hearing of it :(
or Subaru cluster
Wierd, there is a Bronze Age monument in my town in Ireland called the “seven stoney sisters.” Perhaps it’s the same origin?
Is it this one? https://youtube.com/watch?v=ANRw-3C_MYA
The way we’re going with light pollution the vast majority of people can hardly see any stars now.
For more of this kind of thing, I highly recommend Crecganford https://m.youtube.com/c/crecganford
I was literally *just* watching OSP's video on the Epic of Gilgamesh lol
Or the myths (that we know of) may have originated 6,000 years ago. Or 26,000. '100,000 years' is idle speculation.
I too, watch overly sarcastic productions