  Recently, a widely publicized claim has been made that the Aboriginal
Australians discovered the variability of the red star Betelgeuse in the modern
Orion, plus the variability of two other prominent red stars: Aldebaran and
Antares. This result has excited the usual healthy skepticism, with questions
about whether any untrained peoples can discover the variability and whether
such a discovery is likely to be placed into lore and transmitted for long
periods of time. Here, I am offering an independent evaluation, based on broad
experience with naked-eye sky viewing and astro-history. I find that it is easy
for inexperienced observers to detect the variability of Betelgeuse over its
range in brightness from V = 0.0 to V = 1.3, for example in noticing from
season-to-season that the star varies from significantly brighter than Procyon
to being greatly fainter than Procyon. Further, indigenous peoples in the
Southern Hemisphere inevitably kept watch on the prominent red star, so it is
inevitable that the variability of Betelgeuse was discovered many times over
during the last 65 millennia. The processes of placing this discovery into a
cultural context (in this case, put into morality stories) and the faithful
transmission for many millennia is confidently known for the Aboriginal
Australians in particular. So this shows that the whole claim for a changing
Betelgeuse in the Aboriginal Australian lore is both plausible and likely.
Given that the discovery and transmission is easily possible, the real proof is
that the Aboriginal lore gives an unambiguous statement that these stars do
indeed vary in brightness, as collected by many ethnographers over a century
ago from many Aboriginal groups. So I strongly conclude that the Aboriginal
Australians could and did discover the variability of Betelgeuse, Aldebaran,
and Antares.
