For as long as humans have existed, they have looked to the sky. There are thousands and thousands of different myths and legends linked to stars and constellations, but one radical new idea says that one such story could be incredibly old.
The legend is linked to the Pleiades, a set of stars that many cultures call the “Seven Sisters”. But look at them with the naked eye and you’ll only see six; so where’s the seventh star?
Turns out, there are actually seven stars, but two of them are too close to be distinguished nowadays. However, 100,000 years ago, they would have been clearly visible as distinct stars. So, a group of researchers now believes that the “Seven Sisters” name and legends are at least that old.
The Lost Sister
For something this speculative, the idea is surprisingly solid. Most of us think of the stars as fixed points, but they are actually screaming through space at different speeds. This is called proper motion. You don’t see the same sky humans saw 10,000 or 100,000 years ago. You can, however, look at how stars are moving in the sky today and try to back-trace where they would have been in the past.
Ray and Barnaby Norris, a pair of researchers using data from the Gaia space telescope, decided to do just that. They wanted to see what the Pleiades looked like to the first Homo sapiens.
Turns out, the two stars that are close nowadays (Atlas and Pleione) were separated by a larger angular distance 100,000 years ago. In that older sky, the cluster may have appeared as seven distinct stars to human observers. Over time, the two stars visually converged, until modern viewers could no longer reliably distinguish them with the naked eye.
That gives a surprisingly elegant start date for the story. If the “Seven Sisters” myths emerged when there were actually seven visible stars, that would explain why so many cultures have similar stories. Because there are quite a lot of them.
Legends and Stars
In tradition after tradition, the Pleiades are linked to specific myths. In Greek Myth, they are the daughters of Atlas chased by a hunter or group of men associated with Orion. Hindu tradition links them to the wives of the Seven Sages. Berber communities call them the “daughters of the night”. They appear in the Talmud, in Arabic myths, in Celtic mythology, even in Aboriginal Australian traditions, where the myth is surprisingly similar to the Greek one.
In nearly all stories, there are distinctly seven sisters. Myths and legends aren’t exactly solid science, but this is remarkably diverse and coherent. The theory that all these have a common origin some 100,000 years old would conveniently explain everything. In particular, there was little contact between most Australian Aboriginal cultures and the rest of the world for at least 50,000 years.
But the implications are stunning. It would mean that the story has been passed down, mouth to ear, for roughly 4,000 generations. This shatters our previous assumptions about oral tradition. Most historians thought stories dissolved after a few thousand years. This would suggest that our civilization can keep a story coherent through culture alone for much longer than we thought.
Of course, not everyone is convinced.
Can Stories Really Survive That Long?
Some skeptics argue against looking too much into such coincidences. After all, there’s no direct evidence supporting this hypothesis, and studies of ancient human culture are rarely clear. There’s also the possibility that different cultures borrowed it from neighbors. For instance, in Lithuania, the Pleiades are known as a sieve, not as sisters. The sieve was stolen by the devil from the thunder god.
Stories could be borrowed from neighbors and adapted as well, making variations of this legend less of a family tree and more of a tangled bush.
But there are also ways through which cultures could preserve such stories, despite the passage of time. Many indigenous cultures today use rhythm and song as a sort of error-correcting mechanism. If you change a word in the poem, the rhythm doesn’t work anymore. You can’t just tell a story, you have to tell it right, or it doesn’t work. Plus, in many cultures, storytelling is linked to higher status, and learning stories the “proper” way may have been an important rite of passage.
The two researchers presented their hypothesis in a book, but ultimately this book doesn’t claim definitive proof; it can’t. Too much is inferential, and some links remain fragile. We may never know whether this idea is actually true.
But it’s a compelling idea, and one that keeps us wondering.
Modern humans are descended from people who lived in Africa before beginning their long migrations to every corner of the globe 100,000 years ago. Could this ancient group have told the same story some cultures do today? Did humans carry their stories with them, as they traveled everywhere from Australia to Europe and North America?
It’s a tantalizing possibility.
