<h2>Variable Star</h2>
<p>While some mythology and folklore can be reasonably traced back tens of thousands of years - mainly things that we can link to sea level rise, volcanism, etc. - I don't think the simplest explanation here is a 100,000 year old myth.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleione_(star)" rel="noreferrer">Pleione</a> is a variable star, whose <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude" rel="noreferrer">apparent magnitude</a> varies between 4.77 and 5.50 over a long, complex cycle. That's roughly doubling in brightness.</p>
<p>It seems that Pleione has multiple shells of matter surrounding it, is spinning nearly fast enough to tear itself apart, and has binary companion - all of which causes its brightness to vary in unpredictable ways. Appearantly, the most recent minimum brightness was in the early 1970s, and the star brightened slowly for the next 30+ years.</p>
<p>It's pretty easy to imagine that when the faintest star visible (for most people) in a major constellation faded from view, people might come up with a story around it. Family arguments are probably universal. Thus Occam's razor says these myths are less than 100,000 years old.</p>
<h2>Many Myths Are Related</h2>
<p>The Japanese / Shinto dawn goddess <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ame-no-Uzume" rel="noreferrer">Ame-no-Uzume</a> is borrowed from the Vedic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushas" rel="noreferrer">Ushas</a> who in turn came from the Proto-Indo-European <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%E2%82%82%C3%A9ws%C5%8Ds" rel="noreferrer">h₂éwsōs</a>. The Greek Eos and Roman Aurora can be traced back to the same PIE dawn goddess.</p>
<p>So it may be that fairly few independent inventions are required to make this story of the Seven Sisters feel universal.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-08-09T16:40:44.843Z
2023-08-09T16:40:44.843Z
codeMonkey
<p>An assumption is made here, that we are the first advanced civilization that was on this planet in its <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale" rel="nofollow noreferrer">4.5+ billion year history</a>. This assumption is a hypothesis, which, like any hypothesis, can become a theory only after it is proven in a lab with an experiment that is reproducible by third parties.</p>
<p>As an example, Zecharia Sitchin showed an ancient Sumerian tablet, VA/243, showing the planets of our solar system including Uranus and Neptune, which are only visible by telescope, and have been &quot;discovered&quot; in the last 300 years.</p>
<p>So yes, legends and &quot;myths&quot; can be very ancient.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.sstatic.net/Bnunt.jpg" alt="Sumerian tablet VA/243" /></p>
<p><a href="http://www.sitchin.com/teapot.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Image credit: Zecharia Sitchin</a></p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-10-10T16:16:37.267Z
Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please [edit] to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers [in the help center](/help/how-to-answer).
Community
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-10-03T07:15:17.880Z
2023-10-03T07:15:17.880Z
jmarina
<p>There's a tangent at the beginning of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-yJDbC_a2c" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this video</a> on the Epic of Gilgamesh briefly talking about an oddity where most ancient cultures have stories about the Pleiades star cluster, often describing them as sisters, and an aspect all the stories share is that there are originally seven, but one has somehow gone away. This is extremely strange, the video explains, because although there <em>are</em> seven stars in the cluster bright enough to be seen by eye, two of them are too close together to be resolved as separate unaided, so whoever originally came up with the story would be more likely to talk about &quot;six sisters.&quot; The explanation proposed is that the story is so old that the stars' proper motion has hidden an originally more distinguishable seventh star.</p>
<p>Now, the video is sourcing information from a <a href="https://phys.org/news/2020-12-world-oldest-story-astronomers-global.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Phys.org article</a> by the author of a paper about this idea, and the paper's abstract neatly sums up why it strains credulity - for the proper motion to be large enough, it needs to be so old that &quot;these stories may predate the departure of most modern humans out of Africa around 100,000 BC.&quot; Part of the explanation offered is that it was preserved through the largely undisturbed Aboriginal Australian cultures, but that's still an <em>unfathomably</em> long time.</p>
<p>There is a <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/np0n4v72bdl37gr/sevensisters.pdf?dl=0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">preprint of the paper</a> linked in the article and while the argument sounds sensible to me, I have no specialist knowledge and would like to hear a second opinion. Has anyone knowledgeable criticized or otherwise seriously responded to this idea? Is it plausible, or is there something wrong with the data that shoots it down?</p>
<p>Or for that matter, is my incredulity just a personal bias coming from being a Brit who's culture gets smashed to pieces and rebuilt half a dozen times before breakfast by comparison?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-08-06T03:38:44.757Z
Ancient people also called the Big Dipper seven brothers.
Snack Exchange
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-08-11T15:45:24.533Z
If you're interested in the topic of cultural memory, there is a (tiny) discipline called "geomythology". A good book about it is *The Edge of Memory*, by Patrick Nunn. It contains several oral stories related to geological events thousands of years old (like the eruption of Mount Mazama for example), but nothing this old.
Jean-Marie Prival
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-10-03T08:47:53.953Z
Why is this a question about astronomy? It seems to be a question about anthropology.
ProfRob
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T20:50:30.683Z
The question is more about cultural memory than astronomy. I have seen papers arguing (based on coalescent analysis) that a few folktales may date back to the bronze age, but this is an order of magnitude more.
Anders Sandberg
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T21:11:57.090Z
I have the same skepticism about the Pleiades. There are more than 7 stars in the Pleiades cluster, of which six are easily visible to the unaided human eye, and Pleione is hard to tell apart from Atlas. But claiming we know of the "seventh sister" because it was more visible 100k years ago seems like a big leap, and not really necessary. Celaeno is dim but still well within human capability, given dark skies and good eyes. "There's a seventh one but it's so dim you can barely see it" seems like a more likely explanation than a story that lasted unchanged for all of human history.
Darth Pseudonym
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-19T22:34:50.060Z
I don't think there is going to be a good answer possible.  Only personal credulity or incredulity.  As for the "etiquette" **Yes, link to whatever you have**. If a preprint is only in a personal dropbox, that doesn't strengthen the authority....  For what its worth, I find the idea that a minor cultural reference should last from the out-of-africa period of humanity utterly unbelievable - but that is merely personal incredulity!
James K
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-20T13:16:16.647Z
Some aboriginal peoples in Australia have oral histories of the lands that are now underwater because of the sea level rising after the last ice age. So that is about half way back to your 100,000 year mark.
Jon Custer
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-20T18:05:15.010Z
@JonCuster IIRC the sea was at its lowest point 18,000 years ago, which is a lot, but not nearly halfway to 100,000.
Darth Pseudonym
CC BY-SA 4.0
2023-07-20T23:51:45.057Z
Some people with very good eyesight can and do see more than six or even seven stars in the Pleiades—I think some have reported 13, and these accounts seem reliable. Also, our ancestors had pure black skies, which we now lack. So, I would lean more towards an explanation along the lines of some people could see more than seven stars, thanks to eyesight and sky darkness, and they started a story from there. It doesn’t have to go back to before OOA2; just to long enough ago that humans were still mostly in Eurasiafrica…
Pierre Paquette
<amateur-observing><history>
How plausible is it for legends about the Pleiades to be this ancient?
redroid
# How plausible is it for legends about the Pleiades to be this ancient?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2023-07-19)

There's a tangent at the beginning of [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-yJDbC_a2c) on the Epic of Gilgamesh briefly talking about an oddity where most ancient cultures have stories about the Pleiades star cluster, often describing them as sisters, and an aspect all the stories share is that there are originally seven, but one has somehow gone away. This is extremely strange, the video explains, because although there *are* seven stars in the cluster bright enough to be seen by eye, two of them are too close together to be resolved as separate unaided, so whoever originally came up with the story would be more likely to talk about "six sisters." The explanation proposed is that the story is so old that the stars' proper motion has hidden an originally more distinguishable seventh star.

Now, the video is sourcing information from a [Phys.org article](https://phys.org/news/2020-12-world-oldest-story-astronomers-global.html) by the author of a paper about this idea, and the paper's abstract neatly sums up why it strains credulity - for the proper motion to be large enough, it needs to be so old that "these stories may predate the departure of most modern humans out of Africa around 100,000 BC." Part of the explanation offered is that it was preserved through the largely undisturbed Aboriginal Australian cultures, but that's still an *unfathomably* long time.

There is a [preprint of the paper](https://www.dropbox.com/s/np0n4v72bdl37gr/sevensisters.pdf?dl=0) linked in the article and while the argument sounds sensible to me, I have no specialist knowledge and would like to hear a second opinion. Has anyone knowledgeable criticized or otherwise seriously responded to this idea? Is it plausible, or is there something wrong with the data that shoots it down?

Or for that matter, is my incredulity just a personal bias coming from being a Brit who's culture gets smashed to pieces and rebuilt half a dozen times before breakfast by comparison?

**Tags:** amateur-observing, history

> **Comments:**
> **username_4**: The question is more about cultural memory than astronomy. I have seen papers arguing (based on coalescent analysis) that a few folktales may date back to the bronze age, but this is an order of magnitude more.  
> **username_5**: I have the same skepticism about the Pleiades. There are more than 7 stars in the Pleiades cluster, of which six are easily visible to the unaided human eye, and Pleione is hard to tell apart from Atlas. But claiming we know of the "seventh sister" because it was more visible 100k years ago seems like a big leap, and not really necessary. Celaeno is dim but still well within human capability, given dark skies and good eyes. "There's a seventh one but it's so dim you can barely see it" seems like a more likely explanation than a story that lasted unchanged for all of human history.  
> **username_6**: I don't think there is going to be a good answer possible.  Only personal credulity or incredulity.  As for the "etiquette" **Yes, link to whatever you have**. If a preprint is only in a personal dropbox, that doesn't strengthen the authority....  For what its worth, I find the idea that a minor cultural reference should last from the out-of-africa period of humanity utterly unbelievable - but that is merely personal incredulity!  
> **username_7**: Some aboriginal peoples in Australia have oral histories of the lands that are now underwater because of the sea level rising after the last ice age. So that is about half way back to your 100,000 year mark.  
> **username_5**: @username_7 IIRC the sea was at its lowest point 18,000 years ago, which is a lot, but not nearly halfway to 100,000.  
> **username_8**: Some people with very good eyesight can and do see more than six or even seven stars in the Pleiades—I think some have reported 13, and these accounts seem reliable. Also, our ancestors had pure black skies, which we now lack. So, I would lean more towards an explanation along the lines of some people could see more than seven stars, thanks to eyesight and sky darkness, and they started a story from there. It doesn’t have to go back to before OOA2; just to long enough ago that humans were still mostly in Eurasiafrica…  
> **username_1**: Ancient people also called the Big Dipper seven brothers.  
> **username_2**: If you're interested in the topic of cultural memory, there is a (tiny) discipline called "geomythology". A good book about it is *The Edge of Memory*, by Patrick Nunn. It contains several oral stories related to geological events thousands of years old (like the eruption of Mount Mazama for example), but nothing this old.  
> **username_3**: Why is this a question about astronomy? It seems to be a question about anthropology.  

---

## 2 answers

### Answer by username_9 on 2023-08-09. Score: 5

## Variable Star

While some mythology and folklore can be reasonably traced back tens of thousands of years - mainly things that we can link to sea level rise, volcanism, etc. - I don't think the simplest explanation here is a 100,000 year old myth.

[Pleione](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleione_(star)) is a variable star, whose [apparent magnitude](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude) varies between 4.77 and 5.50 over a long, complex cycle. That's roughly doubling in brightness.

It seems that Pleione has multiple shells of matter surrounding it, is spinning nearly fast enough to tear itself apart, and has binary companion - all of which causes its brightness to vary in unpredictable ways. Appearantly, the most recent minimum brightness was in the early 1970s, and the star brightened slowly for the next 30+ years.

It's pretty easy to imagine that when the faintest star visible (for most people) in a major constellation faded from view, people might come up with a story around it. Family arguments are probably universal. Thus Occam's razor says these myths are less than 100,000 years old.

## Many Myths Are Related

The Japanese / Shinto dawn goddess [Ame-no-Uzume](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ame-no-Uzume) is borrowed from the Vedic [Ushas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushas) who in turn came from the Proto-Indo-European [h₂éwsōs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%E2%82%82%C3%A9ws%C5%8Ds). The Greek Eos and Roman Aurora can be traced back to the same PIE dawn goddess.

So it may be that fairly few independent inventions are required to make this story of the Seven Sisters feel universal.


---

### Answer by username_10 on 2023-10-03. Score: -5

An assumption is made here, that we are the first advanced civilization that was on this planet in its [4.5+ billion year history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale). This assumption is a hypothesis, which, like any hypothesis, can become a theory only after it is proven in a lab with an experiment that is reproducible by third parties.

As an example, Zecharia Sitchin showed an ancient Sumerian tablet, VA/243, showing the planets of our solar system including Uranus and Neptune, which are only visible by telescope, and have been "discovered" in the last 300 years.

So yes, legends and "myths" can be very ancient.

![Sumerian tablet VA/243](https://i.sstatic.net/Bnunt.jpg)

[Image credit: Zecharia Sitchin](http://www.sitchin.com/teapot.htm)

> **Comments:**
> **username_11**: Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please [edit] to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers [in the help center](/help/how-to-answer).  

---

