Astronomy professor Ray Norris at Western Sydney University in Australia believes that he can explain a piece of ancient star lore found in cultures as far apart as Australia and Greece. In his forthcoming book Advancing Cultural Astronomy, Norris recounts legends of the Pleiades, also known as the “seven sisters.” The constellation appears in the northern sky at the beginning of winter.
Today, only six stars appear to the naked eye. The seventh star, is so tightly aligned with one of the other stars as to be virtually invisible, yet equivalent myths regarding the missing star can be found in Europe, Africa, Asia, Indonesian, native American, and indigenous Australian. All these cultures speak of seven stars and have similar stories to account for the missing seventh. The seventh star, says Norris, was once clearly separate but has now moved so close to its neighbor, as to be indistinguishable to observers. The separation, says Norris, has not been visible for a hundred thousand years, and from that, he concludes that the myths telling the story must also date that far back. You can read his article on line: https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronomers-say-global-myths-about-seven-sisters-stars-may-reach-back-100-000-years-151568.
Myths of the “seven Sisters” are not the only clues referencing very ancient times to the Pleiades. The Nebra sky disk dating, to 1600 BC, is thought to depict the Pleiades. In the 1990s researcher Frank Edge reported that he had identified a celestial formation incorporated into cave drawings at Lascaux, France as the Pleiades. A series of black dots placed over the most prominent Bull in the famed hall of the bulls was, said Edge, the Pleiades. A few years later, the BBC mentioned the Lascaux’s design, but gave credit for the discovery to Dr. Michael Rappenglueck, a German professor from the University of Munich. “A prehistoric map of the night sky has been discovered on the walls of the famous painted caves at Lascaux in central France,” reported the BBC, and went on to describe the “map” as believed to date back 16,500 years.
In 2018, a University of Edinburg study of artworks at sites across Europe, including Lascaux, concluded that ancient cave art does not, as once thought, simply depict wild animals. Instead, the analysis showed, the animal symbols represented star constellations in the night sky, and were used to represent dates and to mark events such as comet strikes. As far back as 40,000 years ago, humans kept track of time using knowledge of how the position of the stars slowly changes over thousands of years. The findings suggest that long before the Greeks, ancient people understood the precession of the equinoxes.
The ‘precession of the equinoxes’ is the astronomical phenomenon that gives us the so-called astrological ages, as the point of the Spring equinox appears to move slowly backward through the zodiac at the rate of one sign (i.e., ‘the age of Aquarius’) every 2150 years. This is said to be due to a slow wobble of the Earth’s axis that takes almost 26,000 years to circle the zodiac. Detection of any such movement, it is clear, would require centuries of close, disciplined, and continuous observation—something which, orthodox science maintains, would have been beyond the capability of any primitive ancient society. ‘Precession,’ according to mainstream academic science was discovered by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus between 190 and 120 BC, and not everyone accepts that even Hipparchus knew about the precession.
If you could show that long before the Greeks, ‘primitive people’ knew about ‘precession,’ you could make a very strong case for the existence of advanced science in pre-history, something that orthodoxy has consistently denied. Nevertheless, groundbreaking recent research on very ancient cave paintings, makes exactly the point—that indeed, ancient people had an advanced knowledge of astronomy.
The research was published in 2018 in Athens Journal of History. Dr Martin Sweatman, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering, who led the study, said: “Early cave art shows that people had advanced knowledge of the night sky within the last ice age. Intellectually, they were hardly any different to us today.” (https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2018/cave-paintings-reveal-use-of-complex-astronomy)
