> It is among the star clusters nearest to Earth... and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky.
Only six stars in the cluster are visible to the naked eye yet mythology from several ancient cultures share the idea that one of the seven “sisters" is hidden. The article The world’s oldest story?, originally published in TheConversation [2], states:
> The star Pleione... was a bit further away from Atlas in 100,000 BC, making it much easier to see.
These two stars now appear as one to the naked eye which the author proposes is the source of the hidden sister. This dates the story to 100 kya.
[..] Babylonian astronomy collated earlier observations and divinations into sets of Babylonian star catalogues, during and after the Kassite rule over Babylonia. These star catalogues, written in cuneiform script, contained lists of constellations, individual stars, and planets. The constellations were probably collected from various other sources. The earliest catalogue, Three Stars Each, mentions stars of Akkad, of Amurru, of Elam and others. Various sources have theorized a Sumerian origin for these Babylonian constellations, but an Elamite origin has also been proposed.[..]
MUL is ‘three stars each’ and Pleiades was a cluster of stars which is ‘star of stars’. MUL.MUL. While star was depicted as three star(looks like three asterisks), Pleiades was represented as twice that.. two MULs or six stars.
This could be the reason why Pleiades was depicted as six stars even though the cluster has more than 6. Everything came to us from Sumerians tho’
this MUL ("three stars each") is surely the same as LU.GAL (King), DINGIR (God King), ANU (God of the Sky), AN (Sky), may be "sun" (IIDRC), etc.
It is one of the simpler, more obvious signs to draw. I wouldn't read much into it, although one might argue 6ix was a perfect fit if they could only see six (all most of the time).
[..] The first formal compendia of star lists are the Three Stars Each texts appearing from about the twelfth century BC. They represent a tripartite division of the heavens: the northern hemisphere belonged to Enlil, the equator belonged to Anu, and the southern hemisphere belonged to Enki. The boundaries were at 17 degrees North and South, so that the Sun spent exactly three consecutive months in each third. The enumeration of stars in the Three Stars Each catalogues includes 36 stars, three for each month. The determiner glyph for "constellation" or "star" in these lists is MUL (𒀯), originally a pictograph of three stars, as it were a triplet of AN signs; e. g. the Pleiades are referred to as a "star cluster" or "star of stars" in the lists, written as MUL.MUL, or MULMUL (𒀯𒀯).[..]
Wait a second, this doesn't sound right. According to your wikipedia link, the "Seven Sisters" constellation actually has 9 stars (named after the 7 sisters + parents). They are all visible with the naked eye.
> There are two puzzles surrounding the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. First, why are the mythological stories surrounding them, typically involving seven young girls being chased by a man associated with the constellation Orion, so similar in vastly separated cultures, such as the Australian Aboriginal cultures and Greek mythology? Second, why do most cultures call them “Seven Sisters" even though most people with good eyesight see only six stars?
Most people see six bright stars, like those depicted in the Subaru logo. Yet, you are quite correct to point out that the overlapping stars in question, Atlas and Pleione, are named after the parents of the seven sisters in Greek mythology. Six-vs-Seven or Eight-vs-Nine are valid criticisms and raise the question of when the names of the stars were first used.
The narrative-based approach is imprecise but, like Historical Linguistics [2], it might be useful in identifying origins and connectedness. Regardless, knowing that the bright stars Atlas and Pleione were separated in the past is a useful fact for generating and testing hypotheses.
Being technically visible to the naked eye does not mean they are easily discernable. It's like how the Galilean moons are technically visible to the naked eye, but Jupiter's overwhelming brightness makes them nigh on impossible to see except in specific circumstances.
Right, but that they are ever visible to anyone means that the story could just as easily be inspired by the rarely-seen 7th sister, rather than the last-seen-100k-years-ago 7th sister.
This is a much more likely explanation but in all non-scientific accademic fields it's usually more important to come up with a narrative that's appealing to the general public or the political class than with an accurate narrative. Hence the explanation that makes the most sense but is less "Wow"-inducing will be swept under the rug.
There are plenty of fields where we entertain "mysteries" that have perfectly rational explanations but settling the question once and for all with a rational argument would dry up the funding stream for accademicians and could have other undesirable consequences on some countries' political narrative.
one would like to think the most accurate story was awesome-most precisely because of its accuracy. IMHO you are merely complaining that it isn't precise enough to convince you, though it couldn't be improved much without written accounts?
And then it a sense of incredulity is showing, it's unimaginable, 100,000 kya is unimaginable, as if the world was fashioned in the mesolithic.
Who, if I remember correctly, are estimated to have settled about 50kya. There are later intrusions into the peninsula, as it were back then. Oceania was settled even later by boat. The language divide in Australia is overwhelmingly that of earlier indians (if you'll excuse the pun, the land bridge was connected to the Indian subcontinent), with other language families mostly limited to the north end
This I think might strengthen the argument significantly.
The land bridge connected Australia to New Guinea and the eastern parts of Indonesia, not to India. No one has any idea what the precise relation of Australian languages to any other set of human languages is.
Do you live in the middle of nowhere, far away from any light pollution? If not, your inability to see more than 6 means nothing about what someone 2000 years ago would have been able to see.
Not the OP, but I have been observing the naked eye sky for decades from many different locations, including locations far from light pollution. In my best nights, when I was young, and far from light pollution, I could never make out more than 6 stars. And I'm able to spot Alcor very easily, even in suboptimal conditions.
no matter where I am, if i have the night sky, I check for Pleiades and take note of how many I can see. sometimes it's fewer than 6 depending on light pollution, but I have never been able to see 7, even on nights in deeply rural areas where the milky way is stunningly bright and clear.
Indigenous Australians also have incredibly good eyesight, and are probably the people group best preserved in our deeper evolutionary past. See, for example, this article on their special military unit https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-08/prince-harry-may-stru....
All people are equally old of course, but if you mean the ones closest related to a 100k-year-old hunter gatherer group I think that would be the San or another African group. (They of course aren't completely the same either.)
The Australians encountered multiple non-homo-sapiens species on their way to Australia and might have even picked up better vision from them. They do apparently have better temperature regulation suited to desert nights.
Plus light pollution and air pollution. Maybe some other changes in the atmosphere. And very careful looking. You don't need lenses, just looking through a hole in a leaf could be helpful.
I wonder if this means there is something we are missing here. Like maybe there was a 10th star in the cluster long ago that for some reason is no visible to us today
This is unlikely. A star can disappear if it goes supernova, or it implodes to become a neutron star or a black hole. The Pleiades are very close to us (astronomically speaking) at around 400 light-years. It would be virtually impossible for the remnants of a supernova at that distance to remain undiscovered, and also for a neutron star/ black hole to be so close to us and us not know about it.
For example the remnant of Tycho Brahe's supernova is at about 8000 light-years from us [1].
From the WP article, under "Folklore and Mythology": "Some Greek astronomers considered them to be a distinct constellation, and they are mentioned by Hesiod's Works and Day..." (emphasis mine) So it would appear that they are both. FWIW, I have no idea if there is some astronomical technical jargon distinction between "constellation" and "cluster" that inspires your comment. But to this layman, your correction comes across as pedantix and unnecessary. The term "constellation" is clearly valid, here, as common everyday English is spoken.
There is a difference: a constellation is an area of the sky where some stars appear to belong together to form an image. Their actual distance may be vast.
A cluster on the other hand actually is a group of stars that formed from the same material and are thus very close to each other.
So there is a difference, but it's only a problem to interchange the terms the other way round.
Given that the Pleiades are, I believe, the only cluster in the sky large enough to act as a constellation, it's certainly not irrational to treat them as both.
A cluster could be treated as a constellation, but not vice versa.
While I'm glad to be educated about the technical definition, it's still not even remotely relevant. The point is to whether the commonplace usage is worthy of correction... In this case, the correction adds nothing of value to the discussion. It struck me as a rude, self-aggrandizing gesture by an adult who should know better.
A cluster is a collection of stars that are relatively close to each other in space, and bound together as a group by each other's gravity.
For example, the Pleiades has a core radius of only about 8 light years, and almost all of the 1,000+ stars in the cluster are within a volume of radius 43 light years.
A constellation is a two-dimensional region of the sky, more like counties or states on a map. The "celestial sphere" is divided into 88 constellations, which were chosen essentially arbitrarily, based largely on historically significant apparent groupings of stars.
Stars in a constellation superficially look to us as though they're near each other, but they may be very different distances from us, because we see the night sky as two-dimensional.
For example, one of the furthest stars visible to the naked eye is over 16,000 light years away, called V762 Cas in the constellation Cassiopeia. Cassiopeia also contains many other stars that are much closer to us, such as Eta Cassiopeiae which is just 19.4 light years away, practically a next-door neighbor.
Our ancestors could well have seen these 7 stars up to 100 kya. Indigenous Australians probably have eyesight most similar to our hunter gatherer ancestors, at 6:14 (approx. 20:46), much better than ours.
Quoting from an article on their eyesight:
> As an example of how extraordinary the vision can be, Professor Taylor recounted how astronomers were looking at records from the 1840s into Aboriginal descriptions of constellations of stars.
> "The astronomers just couldn't work out how these constellations worked," he said.
> "They talked to me then they went back with binoculars and suddenly they could pick out all the missing stars that the Aboriginal people could see just with the naked eye."
This reminded me of a theory came up with as a teenager, that the Vaanaraas of Ramayana (a group to which the famous "monkey god" Hanuman belongs) may actually be an early hominid that had ape-like features, that lived in parallel with humans in different territory. They were intelligent enough to help the human princes in their quest, which got them a place in their story - a story which went on to become an oral tradition, and got embellished with time to become the Ramayana. If, as proposed here, stories can be orally passed down for tens of thousands of years, that makes it slightly more likely that this outlandish theory actually has some merit to it.
This might not be quite as outlandish as it sounds, because we now have plenty of evidence that early humans were living alongside and interacting with other archaic homo species.
I have a pet (similarly highly speculative) theory that the Nephilim[1] of the Bible might be a earlier oral history of Neanderthals. But I'll just leave it at that, speculation.
The speech portions of the brain were smaller in Neanderthals, which would have made them appear dimwitted to humans, which is how trolls are often depicted in folklore.
They are known to have lived in smaller social groups than humans, and trolls are depicted as living in small groups as well.
Neanderthals were larger than humans, and trolls are similarly depicted as large.
You are just picking the characteristics which confirm your hypothesis.
Trolls in Scandinavian folklore can be very different depending on local traditions. They can be small people living underground, human size, or giants living in the the mountains. They can be solitary or living in human-like societies.
Literal quote from the Wikipedia article you link: "Trolls may be described as small, human-like beings or as tall as men depending on the region of origin of the story."
It was quite common to depict them as a) human like, b) dimwitted, c) living in caves, d) living in small social groups, e) larger and stronger than humans.
You're right that there were other characteristics that were associated with them in some folklore that was not consistent with the Neanderthal hypothesis.
So you just ignore the facts which contradict your hypothesis? This is how people come to believe in wacky conspiracy theories.
How about:
f) often depicted as smoking pipe, g) living in hills, h) or underneath the earth, i) being rich, j) asking trick questions, k) hating church bells, m) replacing human children with their own, n) wearing read hats, etc.
There are several peculiar characteristics that match that of Neanderthals. There is an appreciable probability that it is not a coincidence, when Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals did in fact interact in Europe for thousands of years.
Titans are similar to the Indo-European pantheon of gods which have been around for 5000 years. The Neanderthals haven’t been around for 45,000 years. I strongly doubt that’s the origin for the titans.
The replacement aspect of it most probably comes from the Yamnaya that killed almost ALL the men in northern and Central Europe and replaced them.
I believe there's also a theory that the neanderthals were smarter than our ancestors of the time. That would also fit the story. I can imagine the homo sapiens of the time interacting with the far stronger and smarter neanderthals and describing them as 'sons of god'. I wonder if that's also where the old Greek myths of Hercules (etc) came from.
“Sons of god” is a translation of the Hebrew by non-Jews and is just plain incorrect. It gets passed around as legit probably because it enforces the idea that Christ is a son of God.
But If you ask Jews, who wrote that section of the Bible, benei elokim translates as something like “those who are free”:
“Who or what exactly are the benei elokim? Who are the nephilim? How are they related to each other? And what does it all mean?
One thing benei elokim does not mean is “sons of G‑d.” In fact, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai would “curse” anyone who translated the term benei elokim as the “sons of G‑d.”1 The word elokim in Scripture, while generally referring to G‑d, is in essence merely an expression of authority.2 Similarly, the term benei does not necessarily mean “sons,” but is often just a title. Benei chorin, for example, means those who are free—not “sons of freedom.”
The Jews who wrote Genesis aren't the Jews who wrote the Midrash. The culture from which the myths concerning the Nephilim and Benei Elokim arose had no problems with God having sons, e.g. Mot, Yam. The Jews of Elephantine are documented as having a temple to Anat, daughter of El (God) by his wife Asherah, in the 5th century BCE.
The opposition to reading any of the Hebrew scriptures as referring to "Sons of god" likely arose as a reaction in Rabbinic Judaism to Christianity, both of which (along with Karaite Judaism) arose out of Second Temple Judaism.
That was an interesting read. Thanks. I'm not sure how the linked article expresses more than an alternate translation, though. It says that benei doesn't "necessarily" translate to sons, which doesn't rule out the translation but merely suggests an alternative. The word elokim also refers generally to God, as it says, but can be translated differently. It's an interesting alternative, but the claim that the translation "sons of god" is specifically wrong only seems to be based on the declaration of a single earlier source.
> It gets passed around as legit probably because it enforces the idea that Christ is a son of God.
I've never heard of that before. Not sure where you would have, or how it even does reenforce that idea.
It reinforces “Christ as the son of God” because, if the phrase is translated as “sons of God”, that sets a precedent in the Old Testament that God has sons. The Jews do not believe God has sons. Christians do. So it is in the best interest of Christian translators to translate that phrase as “sons of God”.
> but the claim that the translation "sons of god" is specifically wrong only seems to be based on the declaration of a single earlier source.
No, I only provided one source (Chabad), but there are many others, including all Jewish translations of the Old Testament (Torah) from the original Hebrew to English. You’ll never see it translated as “sons of God” in a book translated by Jews.
> You’ll never see it translated as “sons of God” in a book translated by Jews.
Do the 70 Jewish authors of the Septuagint not count? In the LXX, it clearly reads "οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ Θεοῦ", "the sons of God". The LXX precedes Christianity by quite some time.
Well, actually it is a bit more complicated than just God having a (or more than one) son:
„The Christian doctrine of the Trinity […] holds that God is one God, but three coeternal and consubstantial persons: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. The three persons are distinct, yet are one ‚substance, essence or nature‘. In this context, a ‚nature‘ is what one is, whereas a ‚person‘ is who one is“, from [0] where you can also read a lot more about it.
That's completely missing the point of Christianity: Christ does not require a precedent; he's considered God's "only begotten son", which sounds like an explicit denial that there has been a precedent like him. Considering some mysterious people mentioned in a single line in Genesis as being of similar stature as Christ also goes against the idea of Christ as part of the Trinity.
Also, Christianity considers all people to be children of God (though apparently not "begotten"). On top of that, almost every Christian interpretation of the Bible seems to skip over that mention of the nephilim like it's not there. There's far more reason for Christianity to argue against translating this as "sons of God" than for it.
AFAICT, the Greek pantheon (Hercules etc) is commonly assumed to belong to a religious belief system that in large part aligns with the spread of the Indo-European language, probably (maybe) originating with the Yamnaya culture on the Pontic steppe north of the Black sea according to what is called the Kurgan hypothesis [0][1].
The culture and language seems to have spread across large parts of the Indo-European landmass starting maybe 6000 years ago, eventually displacing many older European and Indian cultures respectively among others. It is assumed to be the reason that such disparate pantheons as the Roman, Greek, Norse and Hindu have many common characteristics. One reason for the relative swift and wide spread of the culture is currently speculated to be that the Yamnaya were the first to domesticate the horse and use them to pull wagons (chariots).[2]
While it could be possible that the original pantheon referred to Neanderthals a more rational interpretation seems to me to be that the pantheon is a deified memory of some prominent people in a small group that roamed the plains of present Ukraine many thousands of years ago, a group that came to conquer other groups because of their advanced horsemanship, establishing traditions that in turn achieved a life of their own as traditions and beliefs commonly do. But hey, it is little more than speculation at this point.
Only a quite small number of the Greek pantheon have Indo-European forebears and were brought to Greece with the expansion of the Indo-European languages from the Pontic Steppes. Most of the Greek deities derive from the non-Indo-European autochthonous culture of Greece, or from interaction with the Greeks’ neighbors in Anatolian. Your own linked article emphasizes this:
"Despite the popularity of Greek mythology in western culture, Greek mythology is generally seen as having little importance in comparative mythology due to the heavy influence of Pre-Greek and Near Eastern cultures, which overwhelms what little Indo-European material can be extracted from it."
Well, 'similar' and 'dissimilar' are elastic concepts, and as the pantheons mentioned are certainly not 'the same' there is much room for interpretation, where different schools tend to stress the difference more than the similarity or vice versa. But there are sufficient common characteristics to trace a lineage in all of them, albeit certainly intermixed with other influences.
In the specific case of the Greek mythology, these deities have distinct Indo-European parallels: Zeus (Dyēus, Sky Father), Eos (H₂éusōs, Dawn goddess), Helios (Seh₂ul, Sun god), Castor and Pollux ( Divine Horse Twins), and more, enough to at least put central tenets of Greek pantheon largely within the realm of the Indo-European tradition.
The cited quote in isolation gives an incorrect impression in this context.
Some people think the same about the Basajaun [1], a big, hairy hominid from the Basque mythology. The myth says he taught humans to use (some) tools (or humans stole tools from him). Keep in mind the Basque language is so old and rare [2] it's not connected to any Indo-European language.
Of course many also think the same of Yeti, Bigfoot, etc.
> may actually be an early hominid that had ape-like features, that lived in parallel with humans in different territory.
Perhaps, but it's impossible to prove one way or another. More plausibly, they observed that primates possess a type of intelligence of a kind similar to humans, and therefore were readily adaptable to that role in the story.
What we do know is that fantastical characters with human level sentience in the Ramayana exist primarily to engage the audience and to drive forward the epic's central themes of good vs evil. Fantastical creatures are a pattern of this sort of storytelling across the world. Modern storytellers have used the same technique to great effect, like the various species of JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth or George Lucas's Galaxy Far Far Away.
In this way, there is a striking contrast between the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata, despite emerging from the same cultural milieu as the Ramayana, is a complex human sociological drama without clear lines of good and evil. It makes little use of fantastical species, as their presence would detract from the story's fundamentally human themes. The only non human characters of consequence are gods, but even they are far from perfect and instead exhibit the same flaws as the humans.
Interesting but I doubt it. Vaanaras do not appear prominently in any of epics/puranas following Ramayana. Only Hanuman is present in Mahabharata and he is clearly living a solitary life when he meets Bheem.
That's an interesting point (no idea why you've been downvoted for it). I have a few theories why that might be:
1. Groups like these were more likely to survive if they were isolated and not occupying territory that the (presumably) more sophisticated Homo Sapiens coveted, so maybe they just didn't get interacted with otherwise. Rama had a Vanavasa (forest-living) and a generally weird out-of-pattern life for the time, so had a slightly higher chance of encountering them.
2. If people in later stories did come in contact with them, they were probably trying to expand their territories or otherwise conquer the land. In that case, the stories are going to mythologize them as savage Asuraas, to give further justification to the conquests.
3. We only have a few stories, of unknown time origin, remaining out of hundreds of thousands of stories told by different groups in different places over the millenia. So even if a significant portion of the stories featured Vaanaraas, it's plausible they might all have been lost before they could reach us.
4. In particular, given that such groups were declining in numbers over time, and the fact that more recent stories are more likely to survive, it makes sense that stories featuring them are more likely to have been forgotten and lost to time.
There is also Jambavan who appears in both Ramayana and Mahabharata. Jambavan’s army fought alongside the Vanara army in Ramayana.
Even though he is depicted as part of the monkey army, he was really known to be a bear. A bear like giant creature.
He appears again in Mahabharata as the possessor of the Syamantaka Gem that was stolen and was in his possession. They live in a cave and hidden from the rest of the people. He is defeated by Krishna and he accepts defeat. He also offer Krishna his daughter Jambavati’s hand in marriage.
In the Puranas ..after the Ramayana war, all the monkeys and bears who lost their lives were brought back to life and they returned to their abode. Mahabharata is to have happened in a different yuga.
Hanuman keeps appearing in all puranas because he is Chiranjeevi..one without death. And hence more of an archetype than a character in every yuga.
The Vedas do not mention monkey people (vanaras), but the Mahabharata and the Ramayana do. The Vedas were composed 800-1000 years before these two epics. So the invention of the vanaras probably happened later, perhaps due to influence from indigenous religious ideas or perhaps a new set of myths. Interestingly, the Ramayana only gives vanaras monkey-like features but doesn't identify them as such, so there is some ambiguity about how they are to be represented.
In "Eaters of the Dead", Michael Chrichton's fictionally-historicized retelling of Beowulf, it's speculated the monsters are a relic Neandertal tribe. It's a minor point in the novel, but it stuck with me (and has become much more scientifically plausible since the 1970s when he was writing), so I always think of Beowulf as being about Neandertals.
I don't think this theory is outlandish, just speculative. That said, given that language itself tends to be hopelessly distorted at such a time-scale there are some significant obstacles to oral histories not getting completely distorted to the point where no original content remains.
It's a nice theory but sometimes simpler, less glamorous solutions might hold the truth.
There are more than 6 "sisters" visible with the naked eye, but most people normally can't see them.
It's more believable to me that the "missing" 7th sister is just the brightest of the less visible ones.
Those less visible would certainly have been used as a test of prowess for determining the keenest-eyed, especially among early societies where such skills were important.
Although it would super cool for the story to have a common ancestor across huge swaths of land and time on Earth, I think this has a higher likelihood of being correct.
There are several stars in the 5-6 magnitude range close to the limits of human vision in the Pleiades. Seven is also often a sacred number. We also have precedent for cultures such as the Greeks and Arabs using double stars to test vision, namely Mizar and Alcor[1,2]. The typical limiting magnitude for unaided vision is about 6 under perfect conditions, but some people with exceptional vision can see to mag 7.
So it seems highly plausible that most people could only see six, but they knew there were about 7 because some sharp-eyed people could see them and would tell them so.
I share your skepticism—myths don’t seem very durable in general. Comparative linguists have reconstructed some proto-info-european myths, but those are probably in the vicinity of 8k years old or perhaps even younger (certainly nowhere near 100k years) and they’re already about as generic as these 7 sisters myths. The only thing that gives me some respite from my skepticism is that celestial myths likely have more durability given the relative stability, ubiquity, and importance of the night sky (it’s one of the strongest cultural touchstones that ancient people had). That said, I have a really hard time believing that even celestial myths have 100k years of durability, and it seems like there must be simpler, more plausible explanations (like yours).
Agreed. When hiking in mountains, on some nights the sky is so clear, air so still and light pollution so low that I can easily discern eight or nine "sisters" there. Such nights are usually in summer, but less frequently also during other seasons.
Of course, in or near large cities, seeing five or six of the "sisters" is about the best one can hope for.
A third possibility is one of the stars used to be much brighter for whatever reason.
This is an idea that's been tossed around for a while; it has the problem that ancient Greek discussions agree that there were only six stars visible as long as anyone can recall -- even though the myth said there were seven. So if there was a faded star, it faded prior to 500 BC. (Also, no good candidates for a faded star from modern astronomical studies of the Pleiades.)
Ancient drawings would help locate the 7th star.
Rappenglück (1997) suggested that a collection of dots in the Lascaux cave paintings might represent the Pleiades, in part because it's located above the shoulder of an aurochs (i.e., like the Pleiades is located relative to the constellation of Taurus). But there are only six dots.
I would think these astronomers would have considered that possibility. One thing to note is that stars were probably less important prior to the advent of agriculture, at which point tracking the seasons became important.
That seems unlikely, there are important seasonal phenomena in hunter-gatherer life, such as game migrations, and knowing when a part of their range will have specific foods ripen.
Sedentary people developed the ability to keep durable records, and to build megalithic structures to track stellar phenomena, sure; but that's ability, rather than importance.
If true then at least one of the stories should sound in that vein right?
Let's consider your rule itself, though first modifying it to the real occams razor which says the simplest answer is probably the real one. Simple is probably more measurable than glamor anyway! So what's the simpler of the two explanations? A complex variation of the story as we now know independently arose in multiple cultures and then everyone forgot the same detail (find the seventh star it's still there), or we've been carrying this story with us since the beginning of humanity? Honestly the later sounds simpler to me. It's breathtaking but sounds entirely plausible so why not?
Actually the second version seems to make more novel assumptions. We have no (other?) proof of any cultural phenomenon older than maybe 50k years ago even existing, never mind being passed on. To imagine such a specific story surviving for such a huge amount of time while being disconnected from reality seems MUCH more unlikely than having similar stories arise independently about a hard to see but still visible star.
Also, Occam's razor says nothing about which explanation is more likely to be correct. It is simply a sensible rule about which explanation is more useful to go with when you have two that explain the same facts equally well. It's a pretty clear rule in physics when you have actual mathematical models to chose between, it's much too hand-wavy in the soft sciences like anthropology.
Could this be the result of writing being non-existent at that time? It would be hard to have knowledge passed on between generations without writing, society and preservation. If they lived a nomadic life, they probably had stories to warm up with foreigners but they could not pass a lot of information.
I don't agree obviously - the seventh sister is there, and not every story has her missing.
And a common early eye-test seems far simpler and more believable than a common myth that possibly predates by tens of thousands of years the start of contemporary cognitive parity within our species.
I'm surprised the article didn't mention one of the most popular names for the "Seven Sisters," Subaru, the Japanese name and vehicle manufacturer whose logo contains six of the stars.
It actually is, the Subaru logo is the 7 sisters. It created the affinity for the brand. Market research identified it, and it has of course grown with marketing. It was something I looked into back in the 90’s when I noticed such a high correlation between the two.
I find it very difficult to believe that any car company in the 90’s targeted the market before they realized they were already winning it.
Not directly. Translation would be "to govern" or "gather together", but Subaru is one of the constellation's names in Japan, like it would also be called Pleiades in the West, deriving from "plein", meaning "to sail."[0]
No, but the radicals in 昴 (pleiades) are "sun", repeat, and "at same time".
So even if we're being very literal, "the one with the two stars at the same time" is an accurate description of both the hidden sister story and the cluster.
They could as easily have been seven geese, seven pebbles, seven lakes, seven boats, seven eyes, seven villages, seven brothers... But they are almost everywhere, instead, seven sisters, across ten thousand miles and fifty millennia.
If the story is not that old, how did they so frequently turn out sisters? Morphic resonance? Without, you are left with nothing but a mystery. Citing a common tradition draws on the least far-fetched explanation, as science demands.
The same applies to stenciled handprints on cave walls from Spain to Sulawesi, and as many millennia.
They're anthropomorphising the stars as gods, people, and animals that are familiar to them. Families with seven sisters in a tribe of 150 was probably a relatively common occurrence, far more familiar than animals traveling in groups of seven (none that I can think of that do so globally) or gods in a group of seven who they'd have to have previously imagined or imagine anew upon identifying the constellation.
Convergent evolution is very common in biology, which has many more degrees of freedom. Why not in culture too?
Notions of "convergent evolution" and "degrees of freedom" fatally undermine your argument.
Culture has overwhelmingly more degrees of freedom than biology, which is constrained by needs to survive and also reproduce. Culture can sustain things like Scientology, Anime, and Froot Loops, in some places even simultaneously. Similarly, convergent evolution occurs only where environmental forces, such as a precise ecological niche, drive development into a very narrow range of possibilities with radically limited degrees of freedom.
In the total absence of any such constraints, the only viable explanation for detailed similarity across vast distances and dizzying time spans is common heritage.
Maybe there are other traditions where these stars are geese or brothers or villages or starbucks baristas but the authors are cherry-picking those cultures where they are women? Indeed, I would be surprised if there weren’t, and if there really are no other such stories then I would be surprised that the authors don’t mention that explicitly since that would be give enormous weight to their position.
Also, TFA only says that the aboriginal stories seem to predate European contact, but which is more plausible: that we found a story that is ten times older than the oldest previously reconstructed myth or that we were wrong and the aboriginal story is actually influenced directly or transitively by some European culture (or some other culture which had a similar myth)? This depends on the evidence back the “seems to predate European contact” claim.
Amazing if true. I got the impression, when I studied (a little) anthropology in the 1990s, that myths were related to the present structure of a society more than to its past, and that you couldn't expect reliable transmission of messages over such long time periods.
Your expectations are a function of what you know and your experiences. In your case, those are dominated by your immersion in literate cultures that rely on written communication formats for information transmission and archiving, not to mention education.
But what if all that knowledge and experience of writing technology and writing based culture were to vanish? What would you be then? Helpless? Lost? Isolated?
Actually, no. You’d still be capable of advanced communications, education, and data storage, using alternative modalities.
It’s like pre-internet humans. They still went out on dates, met up with friends, gossiped and bought things. They just accomplished all that with different tools to what people use today.
Jung, amongst others, believed that myths are archetypal constructs that underpin the architecture of the mind, and are shared by all, which explains much about the uncanny cultural similarities across time and space.
Right, but that would not explain why they are also similar to the actual facts. As an example, from the Stanford article:
"... debate raged in the nineteenth century over Native American legends that seemed to contain ancestral memories of mastodons hunted until their extinction in the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. The possibility was supported by twentieth-century archaeological discoveries of mammoth kill sites that matched local tribal lore about elephant-like monsters."
>* Stories get passed on and some are surprisingly stable.
That's reasonable. While certainly far from proven, the Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis[0] posits the possibility that the "Great Flood" story, which is part of many ancient traditions (and long predates Abrahamic[1] religions) may be from an oral tradition recounting a flood occurring at the end of the last glaciation in Eastern Europe and Western Asia.
While that story certainly isn't anywhere near 100,000 years old, if true, it does add credence to the stability of oral traditions over long periods of time.
What accounts for the missing sister though? If the seventh sister was last visible 50000-100000 years ago, how the myths are trying to account for it now without the memory?
Based on the analysis, it is very likely that the 7 stars were more distinctly visible but then gradually became harder and harder to see upto about 30-40k years ago. So cultures started making stories for why it disappeared. The fact that the stories of why the seventh sister disappeared seem different across cultures may possibly indicate the cultures had already separated when that happened.
I think the idea of the 100,000 years of memory is plausible, but I think it's likely to persist because the number seven seems to be universally important to humans.
People could potentially have superimposed the number seven on the story, as per the rainbow's seven colours and Newton.
7 is an important number across many cultures which pops up again and again. So is 8 (Eightfold path, 8 days of Hanukka, 8 Beatitudes, 8 Gates of Heaven). So is 6 (6-pointed Star of David, 6 Days of creation, 6 Articles of Belief, 6 Ministries, 666). So is 5. So is 9... There are many more things to be counted than there are numbers to count them with. Saying everyone decided on 7 stars because they just all liked the number 7 doesn't pass the sniff test.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and claim that humans have been able to count since before you'd consider them human.
Lots of animals are able to count and it's ridiculous to assume that any individual with even a rudimentary language wouldn't be able to.
With which I mean to say that you don't need a formal understanding of 'mathematics' to count.
Further there's nothing mathematically super special about the number 7. You might say "it's a prime, and also X, Y, Z", but there's pretty much an infinite number of properties you could find for any number you choose.
There are, even today, languages that lack words for numbers higher than 2, 3, or 4 -- including a number of Australian languages. This tends to be more true for languages of contemporary hunter-gatherer. (See, e.g., Caleb Everett's Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting and the Course of Human Culture and references therein, or this article: https://theconversation.com/anumeric-people-what-happens-whe...). Studies of people who are native speakers of such languages actually do have difficulties keeping precise track of different numbers of items, at least at the level of five or more.
(There are Australian languages with more extensive number words, which is probably where the examples of "Pleiades = 7 women" stories come from.)
That is an interesting claim, the wikipedia articles about the history of math claim that the earliest written examples are from 3000 BCE. Finding a written record older is rather unlikely since that corresponds roughly to the oldest written texts in general. We do however have evidence of tally marks that date back to 35000 BCE[1] with one use possibly being a lunar calendar.
Perhaps there was a long time where people with slightly better eyesight could tell them apart while others couldn't, or when atmospheric conditions would obscure it. That might seed stories of the last sister being missing or coming and going.
When a million monkeys are typing stories, the odds of two of them being similar enough to be considered the same is _not just_ the odds of the millionth monkey creating a similar story.
Just like the odds of two people in a group having the same birthday is surprisingly low, so are the odds of different cultures coming up with the same story.
If you add a bit of selection bias, where you ignore all cultures that don't have a seven sisters story and ignore all the other myths that are not similar and you could end up with this unsurprising coincidence.
Seven is a common story-telling number. Seven days in a week, sailing the seven seas, the seven wonders of the world, the seven continents, seven deadly sins, etc.
1. Seven days in a week
2. sailing the seven seas
3. the seven wonders of the world
4. the seven continents
5. seven deadly sins
6. seven sisters
7. the seven canonical examples
There is a whole spectrum of color, but there are only a handful of colors that most humans distinguish and talk about. It has always seemed odd to me that we elevate Indigo into the spectrum of named colors.
However, Newton was fond of the occult, and numerology, and the number seven. He wrote papers about appearances of the number seven in the Bible.
I think that Newton made Indigo an official color just to bring the number up to 7.
The seven colors are a consequence of us having 3 distinct photosensitive pigments in our eyes which aren't evenly spaced in terms of the wavelengths to which they are sensitive. If they were perfectly spaced we'd have 6 colors: Red, Anti-dark-blue=Yellow), Green, Anti-red=Cyan, Dark-blue, and Anti-green=Magenta. However because of the shift, what we consider to be true blue is somewhere between dark-blue and cyan, so we have Indigo which is halfway between True-blue and Red, Orange which is Anti-true-blue, magenta is blue-shifted into violet, and we forego cyan as one of the major colors.
Note that different cultures do not actually agree on 7 colors in the spectrum or which colors they are. For example some languages consider green to be a shade of blue or vice versa, or green to be a shade of yellow. Some only distinguish between hot (red-yellow) and cold (green-blue) colors. There are also some non-spectrum basic colors, for example english considers light-red (pink) and dark-orange (brown) to be basic colors, whereas a dark green is just a shade of green; and this also varies by culture.
Yes, but as has been noted multiple times in this thread, there are more than 6 visible stars in the cluster. They're just not visible at all times of year, and certainly impossible to see for most of us who live in/near cities.
This is not true. The Pleiades cluster looks the same all year round.
Depending on how one defines the limit of what can be seen, there are either 0 stars, or 6 stars, or 9 stars, or hundreds. But only someone with very, very exceptional eyesight under very, very exceptional conditions can actually see seven stars but not nine.
Source: I've been observing the cluster, and the sky as a whole, for decades. I'll draw the locations of the six notable stars just as easily as some will draw the big dipper. And I've never, in decades of observing under many different conditions from different latitudes, ever seen seven stars.
I think the underlying question is, "Can Pleione be observed with the naked eye today?"
> And I've never, in decades of observing under many different conditions from different latitudes, ever seen seven stars.
This really only tells us about you. Even if your vision is 20/20, your experience doesn't preclude the possibility of someone else discerning Pleione. And if they can, that ability can definitely be determined by time of year; which affects not only where the Pleiades are in the sky (e.g. how much air mass you're looking through), but also things like turbulence and humidity.
100,000 year old stories would predate behavioural modernity, thought to have emerged 80,000 years ago.
Maybe eyesight was better 80,000 years ago, so the seven were discernable to the naked eye - combined with zero light and air pollution. OTOH maybe we'll find further evidence to push back behavioural modernity.
Based on an academic article by the same author linked down-thread, the 100k year number is derived from when he thinks humans migrated from Africa. If you think that happened closer to 80kya (wiki estimate is around 60kya), I don't think that changes the fundamentals much.
And the story's key theme of a missing sister, presented as a missing star in the sky, is apparently as salient as ever. Even today in the year 2021, countless people have come together (in their contemporary medium) to wonder and speculate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tigosmIryU Prof. Martin Sweatman says that the paintings in Göbekli Tepe depicts the fall of a meteorite that caused the younger dryas cooling/ice age. now this calamity occured much earlier than the construction of Göbekli Tepe - but he infers that the paintings refer to the constellation of the stars at the time when the meteorite came down. Another example of palaeoastronomy in action. fascinating...
i was thinking: maybe the story of Lot in the Bible (Genesis 18-19) is referring to the same story - a great city destroyed by heavenly fire for its sins would be quite similar to the story that resulted in the religion of Göbekli Tepe.
Sure Pleione and Atlas used to be a little farther apart, but Maia and Taygeta are were also closer together according to their chart. Why could they tell the latter apart when we can’t tell the former?
The distances are very similar but Pleione is much dimmer than either Maia or Taygeta.
Apparent magnitudes:
Pleione 4.77 - 5.50
Taygeta 4.30
Maia 3.87
(Apparent magnitude is a measure of the brightness of a star or other astronomical object observed from Earth, it's inverse logarithmic so smaller number is brighter)
I am sorry to say you might have to go read the linked paper, where this is discussed. The upshot is, visually distinguishing two stars is a function of both their proximity and relative brightness.
"A second factor, called “glare function" by physiologists,
is what prevents you from seeing details next to car headlights
pointing at you. The glare function depends on the dynamic
range and psf of the human eye. Imperfections in the human
eye give it a psf which has a broad base a few arcmin wide
(Ginis et al., 2012), which in turn limits the dynamic range.
As a result, faint stars cannot be seen within a few arcmin
of bright stars...
Pleione is five arcmin from the star Atlas, which is about
four times brighter than Pleione, and the resulting glare from
Atlas prevents most people from seeing Pleione."
I found this text from religios text(Islamic)
Although the star of Süreyya(pleiades) is many stars, Arabs call Süreyya as a star. It is a community of seven stars. Six of them are visible and one is hidden. People test their eyesight by seeing or not seeing it.
fascinating - but I can't make out those three stars in a row (the guys sitting in the boat) from the constellation depicted below. Neither for 2020 nor 100'000 BCE. Also not from Stellarium. Weird.
Never heard of the seven sisters story, or if I did I might have forgotten about it. Do kids learn about this in school nowadays? Seems like it should be taught considering the potential age of the story.
We had a very kid-friendly book of ancient Greek myths[0] as part of mandatory reading (actually one of the first books I've read) and it includes this story.
It's a great way of learning — basically a fairy tale compilation, but the fairy tales are worthy of learning about. Also, the reader learns much about the historical setting.
Would be amazing to write/popularize similar books on other cultures as well. Perhaps the Judge Di series[1] about an 18th century Chinese detective comes close to that.
Two similar stories for a distinct group of stars seems like reaching, though. Hundreds of different human civilizations and they found two with the same story for the same constellation. That could be sheer coincidence.
In Indian astrology, the lunar mansion of Krittika is the same as Pleiades.
In Vedic astrology, there are 12 houses and 27 lunar mansions or nakshatras. They are the daughters of Daksha, one of the progenitors of humans. He was also responsible for the procreation of the universe, stars, gods, demons and all things living.
The world is born and destroyed again and again. One day of the creator is one epoch. When he closes his eyes to sleep and rest, a great flood engulfs all the worlds he has created and erases it all.
He dreams up the next world and when he wakes up, he assigns a progenitor to recreate that world. Daksha was one such progenitor.
He gave his 27 daughters in marriage to Chandra, the moon god. Each one of them is a lunar mansion..or part of what we see as a constellation of star in the night sky. The moon visits each one of them every night. That’s why the lunar calender month is 27. There is also a 28th sister who disappeared.
The third daughter is Krittika whose mythology is tied to pleiades. The story goes that Agni, the fire god was the representative of all the gods in heaven. When anyone made a sacrifice, it had to be made to agni who will take it to the heavens and distribute it to all the other gods.
All sacrifices to gods were shared amongst them all and the blessings from the gods will be divided equally amongst those who made the sacrifices. They were consigned to the flames of agni and agni ate up the sacrifices.
Agni was beautiful and resplendent. He was also single and because of his nature coveted everything and ate everything. Every epoch has Seven Sages. They were the ones who represented humans and made sacrifices on their behalf.
The Seven Sages each had a wife. And Agni coveted them all. His flames of desire leapt higher and higher at the sacrifices as he wanted the seven wives for himself. There is also a verse in the vedas that says Agni is the fire with seven tongues. seven flames.
Unbeknownst to Agni, one other daughter of Daksha was infatuated with him. She watched him with unblinking eyes as his flames danced for the seven pious wives of the sages. The desire he could never reach. Just like her...because he didn’t even notice her.
Her name was Swaha. Being a celestial herself, she had the power to shape shift. So one day, she changed her form to resemble the first of the wives. Agni was delighted. They snuck to a celestial magical grove and had a jolly good time. The next day, Swaha took the form of the second wife and went back to their love nest. And again and again. She has taken the form of all six of wives. But try as she might..she couldn’t transform into the seventh one.
Anusuya..the wife was Sage Atri was so chaste that even by sleight of hand and in someone’s imagination, she couldn’t be seen as the illicit lover of a man who wasn’t her husband.
So now the secret was out. Swaha was reprimanded and Agni is now smitten with Swaha. But the lovers are together now. The alter egos Swaha created were left behind in the celestial grove but because they can’t wander in a world where the real wives existed, they were prisoners inside the glorious celestial grove.
Swaha didn’t trust Agni still and insisted that she will be present too at all sacrifices made to agni henceforth so he wasn’t making side eyes at the sages wives. She becomes the gaping mouth of agni who will swallow all the sacrifices. That’s why..even today..all sacrificial fires are fed with incantations that end with ‘swaha’. It is not a sacrifice if Swaha isn’t present.
Meanwhile the six shadow wives live in the grove called Saravana.(sara = thicket of reeds. vana = grove/forest. it was a forest with lakes and a lot of water bodies with thickets of reeds) Shiva and Parvati start visiting it for their love making. Their lovemaking created a spark so bright and hot that it couldn’t be contained in any of the worlds. It was dropped in the cooling waters of Sara Vana. There the krittikas each picked a piece of it and raised them as six babies. When the children were old enough, they merged as one. With six heads and twelve arms to become the warrior god, Muruga aka Kartikeya. The one who came from the krittikas.
The sisters feel that they have nothing else to do and ask that they become stars in the heavens. So muruga flings them into the skies and they become the pleiades cluster. They become one. They are now known as Krittika.
Many snapshot predictions are possible when krittika star is present in astrological chart. The mythology helps me remember them. Without going into details, Elon musk..for example..has a prominent Krittika. And the snapshot techniques archetype fits perfectly. There are many examples.
Tesla, for example..has a moderately similar chart to Elon Musk(and so it was a neat coincidence his star company is called Tesla..they share the same
Birth date too altho diff years.)..but it shifts by one nakshatra pada which took his life in an entirely different direction even though they shared ascendents.
I like to think that we are all living in a simulation. And I would very much like astrology to be the code that hacks it. But who knows? I am just reading and learning for now. I don’t know exactly what astrology is but I am certainly not dismissive of it anymore.
Anyways..that’s the Krittika/Pleiades myth in Indian mythology.
The Muruga archetype along with the Krittika/Pleiades mythology helps me remember how to decode the nakshatra in a birth chart.
for example, i will always look for themes like fostering/IVF/sperm donation/adoption/caesarian etc if there is a prominent or strong krittika ..especially in the first pada of 13 degrees 20' of aries. also in taurus but it would be slightly different as taurus is venus ruled rather than mars ruled aries and hence the significations change entirely.
thats just an example of how mythology and archetype patterning can help like a mnemonic device. however, why it is always accurate is something i haven't been able to crack yet. but that's a different topic.
There is an evolution of the soul ashwini to Bharani to krittika.
The soul is untethered and wandering in ashwini...in Bharani it’s bound in the womb, hanging upside down and dependent on the mother for everything. It is undecided and while everyone awaits the arrival...the birth..the fetus chooses when to make its appearance.
In krittika tho’ ..it’s the nakshatra of individuality..the soul is born and possesses independence. It is demanding and curious. The symbol is the knife. It’s the knife that cuts the umbilical cord of the baby to step from a metaphysical existence to a physical existence.
For Krittika prominent charts, the best remedy is to give unselfishly to others. Without calculating. Like agni who was the deliverer of the sacrificial offerings to the gods and humans..his duty being that he has to give equally and fairly to everyone their rightful share. Krittikas will overcome challenges by sharing and being fair.
Another one of my favorite stories to read is the story of Nachiketa and Yama from Katha Upanishad. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nachiketa It is the archetype of Krittika and Bharani. (Nachiketa and Yama respectively)
Something beautiful happens in the stories. I started reading all the Puranas and Upanishads with a different perspective after I started studying astrology.
I think ..with enough time..I can map all the stories to make sense of a kind of progression of action and karma. It’s all there...only thing tho’.. it’s coded.
The actual preprint article is [1]. It's quite a fun read.
I personally find the argument quite weak, but just like a Jules Verne novel, where the science foundation is a bit shaky, at least the argument is good food for thought, food that in this case I find to be quite delicious.
First here's a summary of the argument: the Pleiades are a constellation of stars that are part of various myths in various parts of the world. The authors claim that all these myths talk about seven sisters, but since nowadays only 6 stars are visible, and 100k years ago 7 stars were visible, ergo the myths can trace back to a common origin story.
Second: what are the Pleiades? They are a cluster (a group of gravitationally bound stars) of about 800 stars, about 450 light years away from us. The vast majority of these starts can only be seen with a telescope.
Now let's see what parts of the author's argument are shaky.
1. How many stars are actually visible? According to [2] (which is listed in the preprint's bibliography):
"modern observers [..] can typically discern only six stars in the cluster. But that's simply a consequence of a light-filled night sky. With sharp eyes and a clear, dark sky, it's possible to spot up to 12 stars in the Pleiades group."
2. Which 2 of the stars are currently seen as 1? It's Atlas and Pleione. However, in the Greek myth of 7 sisters, these two stars are actually the father and the mother, they are not part of the 7 sisters per se. What the Greeks called the Pleiades actually had 9 stars, the 7 sisters and the parents. Assuming the parents are seen as a single star, a simple way to reconcile the commonality of the 7 number in different myths is that other people saw these 2 stars as 1 too, but simply did not count the faintest of the remaining 7. That faintest of the remaining 7 is a binary star Asterope that is on the boundary of the constellation (and likely to be below the horizon as seen in Australia for most of the year), so its inclusion in the constellation is kind of arbitrary
3. Why are the 2 stars not visible as distinct? The angular separation between them is about 5 minutes of arc. Humans can resolve up to 1 arcminute. Here's a little experiment: "e". Take a look at that e. There are roughly 2 holes in it separated by one horizontal lines. Look at that "e" from a distance, and see how far you can resolve the 2 holes in it. On my computer the horizontal line appears to be about 0.5 mm thick, and I can resolve the letter at about 1 meter distance. At that distance 1 minute of arc subtends about 0.3 mm in length (2pi = 6.28 meters divided by 36060). There you have it, the experiment that shows you can resolve about 1 minute of arc.
But if the arcdistance between Pleione and Atlas is 5 arcminutes, why can't we resolve them? The preprint explains that: the faint star (Pleione) is next to the brighter star (Atlas) and we can't distinguish it because of Atlas's glare. It then goes on to say that in such conditions, the minimum distance for people to be able to see Pleione is 3 or 4 minutes. It somehow concludes that because Pleione is at 5 minutes distance, most people can't distinguish it.
4. How about the past? Pleione is a variable star, its magnitude (brighness) changes. Wikipedia lists a magnitude range of 4.8 to 5.5 (currently at 5.05). Is it possible that it was much brighter during the Ancient Greek period? Well, of course it is possible. The preprint states as such: "we cannot discount the possibility that one of the faint stars was much brighter in the past." And then they proceed to just discount that possibility.
Instead they go for the hypothesis that 100k years ago the arcdistance between Pleione and Atlas was higher by 3.4 arcminutes. Now, a very solid principle of numerical calculation is to always be skeptical of extrapolations. Interpolations are fine, but when you see an extrapolation, pay extra attention. Here, the authors extrapolate from the astronomical observations made during the last 50 years to 100k years in the past. 3.4 minutes in 100k years correspond to 0.01 arcseconds in 50 years. Do we have this type of precision? Wikipedia [3] claims we can reach an angular resolution of 0.001 arcseconds using telescope arrays, and it's possible we can do even better now (remember the "imaging" of the black hole about 1 year ago?). But did we have this capability 50 years ago? I'm not so sure.
I must say the Singularity Hub web presence looks snake-oily to me.
Why do they call it a "university"? Why do they call some of the members "faculty"?
Why do they claim Ray Kurzweil has "a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions"? (https://singularityhub.com/experts/)
Any idea why they brand it like this? Who is supposed to take this seriously?
I'm EU-based and here you're not allowed to claim that your organization is a university if it is not recognized by the state as such (roughly speaking).
Ideally this story should be changed to this URL which has further comments by the author attached to it. Also The Conversation is a legitimate Australian academic site.
By adding an author profile and a list of other Singularity Hub articles by the author, they make it look like the author is part of the Singularity Hub community, but the two articles that he has written are both from The Conversation.
The Conversation literally has a button you can click to help you copy & paste the article.
And there's attribution at the end of the Singularity Hub repost. There's nothing shady going on here.
I don't disagree, but you have to understand that because "university" isn't a protected name in the US, it also doesn't carry the same status and thus calling the Singularity organization a university is less preposterous.
Eg you learn to run a team of hamburger flippers at the McDonald's University. Many SaaS startups have a tutorials page named $BRAND University. In that context, a bunch of atheistic reli-nuts calling their clubhouse a university isn't that far off.
You can pay them money to attend classes they hold (which you can find example Youtube videos of--basically 50min TED talks), and at the end of it you get a certificate. It was modeled after the International Space University, which in France, and shares a co-founder.
I may be swayed that this is more of a "summer workshop" and not as academically rigorous as I'd like, but otherwise I'm not sure why you claim it doesn't deserve the title "University."
In many countries outside the US the term University is protected in law for institutions meeting some very rigorous criteria, so clarifying on what basis it’s called a University on a very international forum like this is useful for those not aware and who might make assumptions about what is meant by University.
The ISU is an accredited University which offers formal Masters degree programs, while Singularity University is not accredited and does not offer formal graduate or undergraduate degree courses.
>but otherwise I'm not sure why you claim it doesn't deserve the title "University."
Just because they can use that title doesn't mean they necessarily should, especially an organization rooted in academia that wants to be taken seriously. Even if it is legitimate and well intentioned, spuriously using the term 'university' and having a disclaimer like 'Singularity University is not a degree granting institution' in fine print definitely doesn't send the right message. I don't think it's an issue of whether they deserve to use that term but it gives the illusion that they're in company with other dubious non-accredited 'universities'. It's just bad optics.
Diversion aside, the article is a publication by one Ray Norris, who works in the Astro physics department at CSIRO, Australia's Government funded science org, and also is a Professor for Western Sydney University.
I've met him and listened to his public lectures at Macquarie University. He has been researching Aboriginal Australian Astronomy for decades and is well published in the arena. He and his wife have traveled all over Oz, gathering stories from the Elders of tribes.
I've heard him talk about the Seven Sisters story from Aboriginal accounts, but one particular story stuck out:
Ray mentioned how one particular elder could individually name 50,000 stars, and he dared any Astrophysicist to mention 5,000.
I'd recommend that the baby not be thrown out with the bath water.
Did that elder offer some proof that they had significantly better eyes than most humans? Because the generally accepted number of visible stars is ~5000 in each hemisphere.
The only experience I had with the Singularity University is an exec at a client of mine who -- after studying there -- told everyone his company needed a moonshot. His idea of a moonshot was simply "triple profits by next year" by telling people they needed to believe it was possible.
So yeah, he probably did not grasp what he was taught, but then again, you'd expect a self-proclaimed university to teach its students better than that.
To me, the Singularity University's target audience seems to be execs who need to convince others they are capable of developing a vision.
I know nothing at all about this, so cannot comment on the Singularity University, but in the US, it’s actually fairly common to attach the word “university” to all sorts of training series. My old company’s HR added “university” to their regular internal training series (complete with a “certificate” that we would get after each mandatory class).
I took seminars throughout my career, and a number were dubbed “university” (Like Apple’s famous —and long-defunct— “Developer University” —DU. I still have the certificates they gave me).
Personally, I find it potentially misleading, but seldom actually nefarious. It does dilute the cachet of the word, though.
That be as it may, I fail to see anything deceptive in the linked article. The widespread notion that the Pleiades have 7 stars while only 6 are visible is definitely interesting.
Not sure I buy the explanation though (that Pleione would have been visibly separable from Atlas 100.000 years ago, and that the memory of that time has lived on in myth). But they do put a question mark after the claim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_University In America, university holds no special branding, and American companies aren't great about respecting EU branding law. See California Champagne and Kraft Parmesan cheese. I don't think anyone attending Singularity University thinks it is a real university; their paying audience generally already has a university degree.
Singularity University is basically an overpriced executive MBA program, mostly paid for by non Americans excited to visit Silicon Valley. For people with infinite money looking for a taste of Silicon Valley and wanting to invest in cutting edge stuff here, their actual educational materials are totally acceptable.
I used to work with their current law and blockchain lecturer.
I also live in the EU, but the EU did not invented universities, and hence whichever bureaucratic definition it made up, shouldn't be used as a measure for universities outside the EU.
Universities were invented in medieval Europe and, to my knowledge, they were always supported by ruling authorities, be them kings, emperors or popes, who granted them their legitimacy.
Of course a sovereign country can define (or refrain from defining) a university in any way they like, but the historical argument really doesn't help much there. The historical notion of a university is very much tied to ruling powers.
The earliest universities were in Asia and Africa,[1] evolving from madrasas founded by religious patrons, similar to how early European universities evolved from monastic schools.
TLDR summary of article: Plain observation only shows 6 stars not 7 because the 7th is quite dim and close to one of the other stars. 100k years ago it would have been further away from the others. Therefore the story must have originated 100k years ago.
> Bullshit. We know nothing and have literally no way to know (only speculate) about anything 10k years ago.
I think you're missing the mark here. Advances in archaeogenetics and newly found well preserved specimens have added an enormous amount of detail and color into the origins of anatomically modern humans, even in the past decade or two. I mean, the stone age itself began 2.6 million years ago, and we found that out through archaeological evidence.
> It is among the star clusters nearest to Earth... and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky.
Only six stars in the cluster are visible to the naked eye yet mythology from several ancient cultures share the idea that one of the seven “sisters" is hidden. The article The world’s oldest story?, originally published in TheConversation [2], states:
> The star Pleione... was a bit further away from Atlas in 100,000 BC, making it much easier to see.
These two stars now appear as one to the naked eye which the author proposes is the source of the hidden sister. This dates the story to 100 kya.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades
[2] https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom...