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This is one of my favorite stories. One of the best parts is the legend of the seven sisters in Australian aboriginal tradition. Theory goes that the legend f
by calamari4065 3y ago
This is one of my favorite stories.
One of the best parts is the legend of the seven sisters in Australian aboriginal tradition.
Theory goes that the legend far, far predates first contact with Europeans, so it must have come with the first aboriginal settlers when they sailed from Africa. Which would make it one of (if not the) oldest stories in history.
- tmnvix 3y agoSailed from Africa? I always thought they crossed the Torres Strait. On a related note, something that has always intrigued me is why there is no historical record of Polynesian arrival on the east coast of Australia.
- calamari4065 3y agoI admit I don't really know. The story I read suggested that settlers sailed from Africa directly. But I don't know what the actual scientific consensus is on this. Really I don't find it particularly interesting as it's mostly guesswork about something 65000 years ago
- joshuahedlund 3y agoGenome sequencing of ancient human bones has revealed a ton of interesting evidence about ancient human migration patterns! See the book Who We Are and How We Got Here
- Amezarak 3y agoConsidering all Seven Sisters are visible to people with good vision in sufficiently remote areas of Australia today, I don't know how one can draw any conclusions about how old the story is. Indeed, with sufficiently good conditions and good vision, you can see more than seven. The Seven Sisters are just the brightest of the Pleiades.
- calamari4065 3y agoBecause it's the same seven sisters legend as found in many other places around the world. Seven sisters chased into the sky by a hunter, and the seventh sister left the sky to marry the hunter. The aboriginals were isolated from the rest of the world for tens of thousands of years. That their legend is nearly exactly the same as European legends is incredibly unlikely to be coincidence. More likely the legend of the seven sisters is a story that was first told before humans left Africa. All of the Pleiades legends must stem from that original story. The interesting part isn't that they have a story about the Pleiades, but that it's the exact same story as everyone else. And they've been telling it for tens of thousands of years before ever encountering the Europeans.
- Amezarak 3y agoI am the last person to promote historical criticism over oral and written traditions, but the case is much weaker than what people who repeat this suggest. 1. There's a lot of stars, and they were very important to most every ancient culture on Earth. 2. Our pattern-matching brains are inclined to see vaguely similar things, even across different times and cultures. 3. Even so, there is very little overlap between Aboriginal constellations and other cultures' constellations. 4. The aboriginal Australians do not in fact all recognize the Pleiades. Some don't see it as a group at all. Other aboriginal groups actually note differing numbers of sisters (5-7) and have different stories about them, although the motif of fleeing from different men represented by different astronomical objects is a more common one than not. The case for this is nice to imagine but very weak. It is not the case that "they" have the "exact same story" at all.
- a_gnostic 3y agoCan confirm: My neighbour said "Pleiades" is a word I made up, and insists the only constellation is the "Big Dipper"
- strken 3y agoI don't think the number 7 is a smoking gun: https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/25611/explaining-mathematically-why-most-people-chose-7-when-asked-to-chose-a-number-b https://psychology.stackexchange.com/questions/25611/explain... It's unremarkable that there are so many legends with 7 whatevers if humans choose it 45% of the time they're asked to guess a random number between 1 and 10. People just really like the number 7.