This reminded me of a theory came up with as a teenager, that the Vaanaraas of Ramayana (a group to which the famous "monkey god" Hanuman belongs) may actually be an early hominid that had ape-like features, that lived in parallel with humans in different territory. They were intelligent enough to help the human princes in their quest, which got them a place in their story - a story which went on to become an oral tradition, and got embellished with time to become the Ramayana. If, as proposed here, stories can be orally passed down for tens of thousands of years, that makes it slightly more likely that this outlandish theory actually has some merit to it.
It's a nice theory but sometimes simpler, less glamorous solutions might hold the truth.
There are more than 6 "sisters" visible with the naked eye, but most people normally can't see them.
It's more believable to me that the "missing" 7th sister is just the brightest of the less visible ones.
Those less visible would certainly have been used as a test of prowess for determining the keenest-eyed, especially among early societies where such skills were important.
"Ah, but can you find the hiding sister?"
I'm surprised the article didn't mention one of the most popular names for the "Seven Sisters," Subaru, the Japanese name and vehicle manufacturer whose logo contains six of the stars.
> ... May Reach Back 100k Years
Or may not.
One important fact: people get accolades and sometimes even direct monetary incentives for finding something that is supposedly "oldest of".
Nobody gets famous or rich by revising "oldest of" dates to a more recent timeline.
Here is another story about myths being extremely persistent:
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/02/27/...
Amazing if true. I got the impression, when I studied (a little) anthropology in the 1990s, that myths were related to the present structure of a society more than to its past, and that you couldn't expect reliable transmission of messages over such long time periods.
Edit: here is a cool article about geomythology - https://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/MayorGeomythology.pdf
I can't help but feel that some combination of the Birthday paradox [0] and primates churning out stories [1] is going on here.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
Seven is a common story-telling number. Seven days in a week, sailing the seven seas, the seven wonders of the world, the seven continents, seven deadly sins, etc.
Fool The reason why the seven stars are no more than seven is a pretty reason.
KING LEAR
Because they are not eight?
Yes, indeed: thou wouldst make a good fool.
TFA is speculative fiction - just enjoy!
100,000 year old stories would predate behavioural modernity, thought to have emerged 80,000 years ago.
Maybe eyesight was better 80,000 years ago, so the seven were discernable to the naked eye - combined with zero light and air pollution. OTOH maybe we'll find further evidence to push back behavioural modernity.
And the story's key theme of a missing sister, presented as a missing star in the sky, is apparently as salient as ever. Even today in the year 2021, countless people have come together (in their contemporary medium) to wonder and speculate.
Seems to fit with Seveneves novel quite well. Seven woman escaping into space. Wonder if deliberate?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tigosmIryU Prof. Martin Sweatman says that the paintings in Göbekli Tepe depicts the fall of a meteorite that caused the younger dryas cooling/ice age. now this calamity occured much earlier than the construction of Göbekli Tepe - but he infers that the paintings refer to the constellation of the stars at the time when the meteorite came down. Another example of palaeoastronomy in action. fascinating...
Sure Pleione and Atlas used to be a little farther apart, but Maia and Taygeta are were also closer together according to their chart. Why could they tell the latter apart when we can’t tell the former?
I found this text from religios text(Islamic) Although the star of Süreyya(pleiades) is many stars, Arabs call Süreyya as a star. It is a community of seven stars. Six of them are visible and one is hidden. People test their eyesight by seeing or not seeing it.
And Islamic history is 1400 years old.
fascinating - but I can't make out those three stars in a row (the guys sitting in the boat) from the constellation depicted below. Neither for 2020 nor 100'000 BCE. Also not from Stellarium. Weird.
Never heard of the seven sisters story, or if I did I might have forgotten about it. Do kids learn about this in school nowadays? Seems like it should be taught considering the potential age of the story.
I've been reading 'Worlds in Collision' by Immanuel Velikovsky - interesting book if you're drawn to comparative mythology.
I find it highly doubtful multiple coherent narratives could survive over a hundred thousand year span of oral storytelling.
Brits pronouncing Merope "muh-rope" and insisting they're right is the most british ever.
Similar Myth in my culture too. Burmese.
Who actually gets to see stars anymore?
30 years ago seeing stars was a common occurrence for me, now, due to light pollution ?Seems like a rarity.
In Indian astrology, the lunar mansion of Krittika is the same as Pleiades.
In Vedic astrology, there are 12 houses and 27 lunar mansions or nakshatras. They are the daughters of Daksha, one of the progenitors of humans. He was also responsible for the procreation of the universe, stars, gods, demons and all things living.
The world is born and destroyed again and again. One day of the creator is one epoch. When he closes his eyes to sleep and rest, a great flood engulfs all the worlds he has created and erases it all.
He dreams up the next world and when he wakes up, he assigns a progenitor to recreate that world. Daksha was one such progenitor.
He gave his 27 daughters in marriage to Chandra, the moon god. Each one of them is a lunar mansion..or part of what we see as a constellation of star in the night sky. The moon visits each one of them every night. That’s why the lunar calender month is 27. There is also a 28th sister who disappeared.
The third daughter is Krittika whose mythology is tied to pleiades. The story goes that Agni, the fire god was the representative of all the gods in heaven. When anyone made a sacrifice, it had to be made to agni who will take it to the heavens and distribute it to all the other gods.
All sacrifices to gods were shared amongst them all and the blessings from the gods will be divided equally amongst those who made the sacrifices. They were consigned to the flames of agni and agni ate up the sacrifices.
Agni was beautiful and resplendent. He was also single and because of his nature coveted everything and ate everything. Every epoch has Seven Sages. They were the ones who represented humans and made sacrifices on their behalf.
The Seven Sages each had a wife. And Agni coveted them all. His flames of desire leapt higher and higher at the sacrifices as he wanted the seven wives for himself. There is also a verse in the vedas that says Agni is the fire with seven tongues. seven flames.
Unbeknownst to Agni, one other daughter of Daksha was infatuated with him. She watched him with unblinking eyes as his flames danced for the seven pious wives of the sages. The desire he could never reach. Just like her...because he didn’t even notice her.
Her name was Swaha. Being a celestial herself, she had the power to shape shift. So one day, she changed her form to resemble the first of the wives. Agni was delighted. They snuck to a celestial magical grove and had a jolly good time. The next day, Swaha took the form of the second wife and went back to their love nest. And again and again. She has taken the form of all six of wives. But try as she might..she couldn’t transform into the seventh one.
Anusuya..the wife was Sage Atri was so chaste that even by sleight of hand and in someone’s imagination, she couldn’t be seen as the illicit lover of a man who wasn’t her husband.
So now the secret was out. Swaha was reprimanded and Agni is now smitten with Swaha. But the lovers are together now. The alter egos Swaha created were left behind in the celestial grove but because they can’t wander in a world where the real wives existed, they were prisoners inside the glorious celestial grove.
Swaha didn’t trust Agni still and insisted that she will be present too at all sacrifices made to agni henceforth so he wasn’t making side eyes at the sages wives. She becomes the gaping mouth of agni who will swallow all the sacrifices. That’s why..even today..all sacrificial fires are fed with incantations that end with ‘swaha’. It is not a sacrifice if Swaha isn’t present.
Meanwhile the six shadow wives live in the grove called Saravana.(sara = thicket of reeds. vana = grove/forest. it was a forest with lakes and a lot of water bodies with thickets of reeds) Shiva and Parvati start visiting it for their love making. Their lovemaking created a spark so bright and hot that it couldn’t be contained in any of the worlds. It was dropped in the cooling waters of Sara Vana. There the krittikas each picked a piece of it and raised them as six babies. When the children were old enough, they merged as one. With six heads and twelve arms to become the warrior god, Muruga aka Kartikeya. The one who came from the krittikas.
The sisters feel that they have nothing else to do and ask that they become stars in the heavens. So muruga flings them into the skies and they become the pleiades cluster. They become one. They are now known as Krittika.
Many snapshot predictions are possible when krittika star is present in astrological chart. The mythology helps me remember them. Without going into details, Elon musk..for example..has a prominent Krittika. And the snapshot techniques archetype fits perfectly. There are many examples.
Tesla, for example..has a moderately similar chart to Elon Musk(and so it was a neat coincidence his star company is called Tesla..they share the same Birth date too altho diff years.)..but it shifts by one nakshatra pada which took his life in an entirely different direction even though they shared ascendents.
I like to think that we are all living in a simulation. And I would very much like astrology to be the code that hacks it. But who knows? I am just reading and learning for now. I don’t know exactly what astrology is but I am certainly not dismissive of it anymore.
Anyways..that’s the Krittika/Pleiades myth in Indian mythology.
The actual preprint article is [1]. It's quite a fun read.
I personally find the argument quite weak, but just like a Jules Verne novel, where the science foundation is a bit shaky, at least the argument is good food for thought, food that in this case I find to be quite delicious.
First here's a summary of the argument: the Pleiades are a constellation of stars that are part of various myths in various parts of the world. The authors claim that all these myths talk about seven sisters, but since nowadays only 6 stars are visible, and 100k years ago 7 stars were visible, ergo the myths can trace back to a common origin story.
Second: what are the Pleiades? They are a cluster (a group of gravitationally bound stars) of about 800 stars, about 450 light years away from us. The vast majority of these starts can only be seen with a telescope.
Now let's see what parts of the author's argument are shaky.
1. How many stars are actually visible? According to [2] (which is listed in the preprint's bibliography):
"modern observers [..] can typically discern only six stars in the cluster. But that's simply a consequence of a light-filled night sky. With sharp eyes and a clear, dark sky, it's possible to spot up to 12 stars in the Pleiades group."
2. Which 2 of the stars are currently seen as 1? It's Atlas and Pleione. However, in the Greek myth of 7 sisters, these two stars are actually the father and the mother, they are not part of the 7 sisters per se. What the Greeks called the Pleiades actually had 9 stars, the 7 sisters and the parents. Assuming the parents are seen as a single star, a simple way to reconcile the commonality of the 7 number in different myths is that other people saw these 2 stars as 1 too, but simply did not count the faintest of the remaining 7. That faintest of the remaining 7 is a binary star Asterope that is on the boundary of the constellation (and likely to be below the horizon as seen in Australia for most of the year), so its inclusion in the constellation is kind of arbitrary
3. Why are the 2 stars not visible as distinct? The angular separation between them is about 5 minutes of arc. Humans can resolve up to 1 arcminute. Here's a little experiment: "e". Take a look at that e. There are roughly 2 holes in it separated by one horizontal lines. Look at that "e" from a distance, and see how far you can resolve the 2 holes in it. On my computer the horizontal line appears to be about 0.5 mm thick, and I can resolve the letter at about 1 meter distance. At that distance 1 minute of arc subtends about 0.3 mm in length (2pi = 6.28 meters divided by 36060). There you have it, the experiment that shows you can resolve about 1 minute of arc.
But if the arcdistance between Pleione and Atlas is 5 arcminutes, why can't we resolve them? The preprint explains that: the faint star (Pleione) is next to the brighter star (Atlas) and we can't distinguish it because of Atlas's glare. It then goes on to say that in such conditions, the minimum distance for people to be able to see Pleione is 3 or 4 minutes. It somehow concludes that because Pleione is at 5 minutes distance, most people can't distinguish it.
4. How about the past? Pleione is a variable star, its magnitude (brighness) changes. Wikipedia lists a magnitude range of 4.8 to 5.5 (currently at 5.05). Is it possible that it was much brighter during the Ancient Greek period? Well, of course it is possible. The preprint states as such: "we cannot discount the possibility that one of the faint stars was much brighter in the past." And then they proceed to just discount that possibility.
Instead they go for the hypothesis that 100k years ago the arcdistance between Pleione and Atlas was higher by 3.4 arcminutes. Now, a very solid principle of numerical calculation is to always be skeptical of extrapolations. Interpolations are fine, but when you see an extrapolation, pay extra attention. Here, the authors extrapolate from the astronomical observations made during the last 50 years to 100k years in the past. 3.4 minutes in 100k years correspond to 0.01 arcseconds in 50 years. Do we have this type of precision? Wikipedia [3] claims we can reach an angular resolution of 0.001 arcseconds using telescope arrays, and it's possible we can do even better now (remember the "imaging" of the black hole about 1 year ago?). But did we have this capability 50 years ago? I'm not so sure.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/np0n4v72bdl37gr/sevensisters.pdf?d...
[2] https://www.space.com/pleiades.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution#Telescope_a...
I must say the Singularity Hub web presence looks snake-oily to me. Why do they call it a "university"? Why do they call some of the members "faculty"? Why do they claim Ray Kurzweil has "a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions"? (https://singularityhub.com/experts/)
Any idea why they brand it like this? Who is supposed to take this seriously?
I'm EU-based and here you're not allowed to claim that your organization is a university if it is not recognized by the state as such (roughly speaking).
Recorded history only goes back to 2600 BC.
TLDR summary of article: Plain observation only shows 6 stars not 7 because the 7th is quite dim and close to one of the other stars. 100k years ago it would have been further away from the others. Therefore the story must have originated 100k years ago.
Bollocks and bullshit.
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Title seems to have no correlation with the article.
Edit: My bad - I clicked through to another link on the page accidentally
Bullshit. We know nothing and have literally no way to know (only speculate) about anything 10k years ago.
Besides, every text is being altered at each rewrite (before printing technology) and even no story is told two times exactly the same.
Any decent scholar of ancient texts will tell you that. Indian ancient literature is the canonical case study.
The Pleiades[1], also known as the Seven Sisters:
> It is among the star clusters nearest to Earth... and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky.
Only six stars in the cluster are visible to the naked eye yet mythology from several ancient cultures share the idea that one of the seven “sisters" is hidden. The article The world’s oldest story?, originally published in TheConversation [2], states:
> The star Pleione... was a bit further away from Atlas in 100,000 BC, making it much easier to see.
These two stars now appear as one to the naked eye which the author proposes is the source of the hidden sister. This dates the story to 100 kya.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades
[2] https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom...