If you live in the northern hemisphere in an area with relatively little light pollution, and you look up at the sky on a clear night sometime between November and February, you will see three prominent constellations overhead. The easiest to find is Orion (traditionally imagined as a hunter wielding a bow), a large constellation which contains two of the brightest stars in the sky, Rigel and Betelgeuse, as well as the line of three bright stars known as “Orion’s belt.” If you follow the line of Orion’s belt, you’ll find Taurus (traditionally imagined as a bull’s head), which includes a cluster of stars shaped like the letter V; these are the Hyades, and at the tip of the left side of this cluster is the very bright red star Aldebaran.
If you follow the path of Orion’s belt even further, past Taurus, you’ll find the Pleiades, a very tight cluster of stars, which form the shape of a tiny dipper. In many cultures around the world, the Pleiades are said to be seven in number and are known as the “Seven Sisters,” but most people with clear eyesight can only make out six of them using the naked eye. Various cultures, including the ancient Greeks and some Indigenous peoples of Australia and the Americas, have told stories to explain why, even though the Pleiades are said to be seven, only six are visible. (With telescopes, astronomers can tell that this cluster actually includes thousands of stars.)
Humans in various cultures around the world have been telling stories about these three constellations (Orion, Taurus, and the Pleiades) for a very, very long time, and myths often associate them together. The question is: How old are the stories that we tell about them? Recently, a pair of researchers has claimed that the myth of the “lost Pleiad” may date as far back as 100,000 years ago, which would make it humanity’s oldest known story. Popular science platforms such as the Museum of Science in Boston and the YouTube channel SciShow have promoted this claim to a mass audience. In this post, I will explain what evidence the claim relies on and why it is almost certainly incorrect.
Background: early human migrations out of Africa
In order to understand the hypothesis that humanity’s oldest myth may be 100,000 years old (and the very significant problems with this hypothesis), it is important to cover some background about human prehistory, the sky, and myths about the Pleiades from cultures around the world.
The modern scientific consensus is that anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved in Africa. The earliest Homo sapiens fossils come from Africa and date to around 315,000 years ago. Today, the greatest human genetic diversity exists within Africa, where multiple mitochondrial haplogroups are present. By contrast, all human populations outside of Africa belong to a single mitochondrial haplogroup, which is also present in Africa. This indicates that all non-African populations share a common descent from a single group of humans who left Africa.
Several waves of modern humans left Africa at different times, but the group from whom all modern non-African populations are descended is believed to have migrated into Eurasia sometime between 85,000 and 55,000 years ago. In the Near East and southern Europe, these humans encountered and bred with Neanderthals, while, in Asia, they encountered and bred with another group of archaic humans known as Denisovans. As a result, all people today of non-African ancestry carry a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, and most East Asians, Aboriginal Australians, and Indigenous peoples of Oceania and the Americas also carry a small amount of Denisovan DNA.
At the time when humans were expanding out of Africa, the planet looked very different from how it does today. Ice sheets covered all of northern Europe and northern North America. Global temperatures were much cooler, and sea levels were much lower. Underneath the ice sheets, most of what is now the North Sea was dry land, which connected Britain and Ireland to the European continent. Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea were connected as a single continent known as Sahul, and Sumatra, Java, and Borneo were all connected to the Asian mainland.
Humans from southern Asia spread to Australia sometime between 65,000 and 55,000 years ago, and humans from northeastern Asia spread to the Americas sometime between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago. After this time, there was no direct contact between the peoples of the Americas and those of the Old World until Norse explorers reached North America in the late tenth century CE, and no contact between the peoples of Australia and the Old World until the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon made the first recorded landfall in Australia in 1606.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing one interpretation of early human migrations out of Africa
The night sky as prehistoric peoples would have seen it
Today, most people live in cities, where light pollution is absolutely pervasive. When they look up at the night sky, they see very few or no stars. Even in the rural Midwest where I grew up, far away from any large cities, light pollution is severe enough that only the bright stars forming the major constellations are clearly visible, and one can only just barely see the Milky Way.
By contrast, most people who lived before the invention of electric lighting, and especially before the emergence of cities, would have regularly seen the sky with essentially no light pollution whatsoever. For them, the night sky would have been absolutely full of stars that most people today have never seen.
In order to truly see the night sky the way our ancestors thousands of years ago saw it, you have to go to an extremely remote location far away from all human settlements, such as the desert of the southwestern United States, Chile, or the Sahara.
The photo below shows the sky as it appears on an ordinary night from a location in the Chilean desert. It’s taken with a long exposure time, because it’s impossible to photograph the night sky otherwise, so it picks up more than the human eye would see, but it’s a closer approximation of what our prehistoric ancestors would have seen when they looked up at the sky than what most people living in non-remote areas see when we look up the sky today.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing the night sky as seen from Paranal in the Chilean desert with almost no light pollution
Magdalenian cave paintings of Taurus and the Pleiades
During the Upper Paleolithic, humans lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in relatively small, sparse communities. As I discuss in this post I wrote in February 2020, contrary to popular belief, Paleolithic people did not typically live in caves, but they did sometimes use caves as temporary shelters, burial places for their dead, or places for performing rituals.
Remains and artifacts left in caves are more likely to survive than those left out in the open, and, as a result, discoveries in caves disproportionately shape our knowledge of Paleolithic cultures. These discoveries include paintings that Paleolithic humans made on cave walls, which, as I discuss in this post from April 2022 about the oldest evidence for belief in deities, provide tantalizing glimpses into their beliefs.
From around 19,000 to 11,000 BCE, a hunter-gatherer culture thrived in western continental Europe that archaeologists call the “Magdalenian.” The Magdalenian people primarily inhabited parts of what are now Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany, with the largest number of Magdalenian sites being clustered in southern and central France.
During the early Magdalenian period, ice sheets still covered most of northern Europe, and the lands the Magdalenian people inhabited were mostly steppe forest or steppe-tundra environments, with relatively little rainfall and cold winters. The Magdalenian people hunted reindeer, red deer, wild horses, steppe bison, mammoths, and aurochs (an extinct species of large wild bovine, which is believed to be the wild ancestor of modern domestic cattle) for survival, and they made many cave paintings depicting these creatures.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the extent of the Magdalenian culture and the contemporary Epigravettian culture
The German astronomer Michael A. Rappenglück has argued that some Magdalenian cave paintings in western Europe depict star maps showing the constellation Taurus as an aurochs, accompanied by the Pleiades (Rappenglück 1997, 217–225; Rappenglück 1999, 392–398).
The oldest depiction of Taurus and the Pleiades that Rappenglück has identified occurs on a rock panel from the “rotunde” near the entrance to the cave La-Tête-du-Lion in southern France. The painting dates between c. 20,000 and c. 19,000 BCE and is quite rough and faded. It depicts an aurochs standing facing east with a cluster of twenty-one dots over its shoulder, seven dots on its flank, and a single dot above its left front leg. Rappenglück identifies the seven dots on the aurochs’s flank as the Pleiades and the single dot above its leg as Aldebaran (Rappenglück 1999, 392).
If I were viewing the La-Tête-du-Lion painting on its own without context, I probably wouldn’t find Rappenglück’s argument that it represents Taurus and the Pleiades very convincing. Rappenglück uses a line drawing of the painting that clearly shows seven dots on the aurochs’s flank, but, in actual photographs, the pigment is so faded that it is much harder to tell if the number of dots is really seven. There’s also the problem that any random cluster of dots is statistically likely to resemble some constellation or another, and this wouldn’t necessarily mean that the person who made those dots intended them to represent that constellation. Fortunately, this is not Rappenglück’s only example.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of the rock panel painting from La-Tête-du-Lion
ABOVE: Line drawing from Rappenglück’s article showing the rock panel painting from La-Tête-du-Lion with clearer outlines
Rappenglück identifies a much clearer painting of Taurus and the Pleiades on the ceiling of the Salle de Taureau (“Hall of Bulls”) in the Lascaux cave network in southern France. This painting dates around 15,300 BCE, roughly four or five thousand years later than the La-Tête-du-Lion painting. By the time this painting was made, the ice sheets that had covered Europe were beginning to retreat, and the global climate was starting to become warmer and wetter.
The painting depicts a female aurochs in the position of the constellation Taurus, with the aurochs’s horns in the position of the traditional “horns” formed by the stars Elnath and Zeta Tauri. A series of dots on the aurochs’s face form a rough V-shape resembling the Hyades, with the aurochs’s eye in the position of Aldebaran. Over the aurochs’s shoulder, where the Pleiades would normally appear in the sky, is a cluster of six dots in the distinct dipper shape of the Pleiades, with four upper stars and two lower stars.
I view the Lascaux painting as a more convincing example than the La-Tête-du-Lion painting, because the dots appear clearer in photographs and their positions more clearly correspond to those of stars in the sky, which reduces the likelihood that the resemblance is just a coincidence. Even so, I’m not sure if I’m fully convinced, and I do think coincidence is still a possibility.
If Rappenglück’s interpretations of these cave paintings are correct, this would indicate that Magdalenian hunter-gatherers in western Europe between 22,000 and 17,000 years ago already identified the constellation Taurus as a bovine and that it, alongside the Pleiades, was somehow significant in their culture.
Rappenglück points out that many cultures around the world have used Taurus and the Pleiades for seasonal timekeeping and argues that the Magdalenians may have used these constellations to keep track of the aurochs mating season, which would have been important for their survival as hunter-gatherers (Rappenglück 1997, 223).
ABOVE: Photo of the painting showing Orion’s belt, Taurus as an aurochs, and the Pleiades from the Hall of Bulls in the Lascaux cave network, dated c. 15,300 BCE
Ancient Sumerian stories about Taurus as the Bull of Heaven
Whatever the case may be, we can be certain that the identification of Taurus as a bull is at least over four thousand years old, since it is securely attested in Sumerian texts dated to the late third millennium BCE.
Over the course of the fourth millennium BCE, settlements in what is now southern Iraq grew into the world’s first true cities, which included Uruk, Nippur, Kish, Ur, and Eridu. During the Late Uruk Period (lasted c. 3500 – c. 3100 BCE), the people living in these cities developed a system of proto-writing known as proto-cuneiform, which they used to write on clay tablets. Eventually, the system became more sophisticated and developed into cuneiform proper.
Scholars aren’t entirely certain what the language of the earliest proto-cuneiform was, because the early script is largely pictographic and not entirely readable. By the time cuneiform becomes readable to us, however, it was being used to write the Sumerian language, which is a language isolate, meaning it is not related to any other known language. (There were almost certainly other languages related to Sumerian at some time, but Sumerian is the only one that was ever written down.)
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of a clay tablet bearing a food issue list in proto-cuneiform, dated to the Uruk III Phase (lasted c. 3200 – c. 3000 BCE), now held in the British Museum
At first, the Sumerians only used cuneiform for accounting and administrative records, but, around the middle of the third millennium BCE (around a thousand years after the first proto-cuneiform), they began to use it to write down works of poetry, which tell myths that are sometimes related to the constellations.
The Sumerians identified Taurus as MUL.GU4.AN.NA, which means the “Bull of Heaven,” the Pleiades as MUL.MUL, which means “the stars,” and Orion as MUL.SIPA.ZI.AN.NA, which means “the True Shepherd of Heaven” (Rochberg 2004, 127, no. 21).
The Sumerian-language poem Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven (ETCSL 1.8.1.2), which was most likely composed during the Third Dynasty of Ur (lasted c. 2112 – c. 2004 BCE), tells the story of how the goddess Inanna forced her father, the sky god An, to give her the Bull of Heaven, which she sent to destroy the hero Gilgamesh. The bull caused terrible destruction, but Gilgamesh and his companion Enkidu fought and killed it together. Enkidu, however, taunted Inanna and threw the bull’s hindquarters at her, and the gods decided that he needed to die for his impiety.
The Assyriologists Jeremy Black and Anthony Green speculate that the Sumerians may have invented the story of Enkidu throwing the hindquarters of the Bull of Heaven at Inanna as an etiology to explain why the constellation Taurus appears to be missing its hindquarters (Black & Green 1992, 49).
A number of ancient artistic depictions of Gilgamesh killing the Bull of Heaven have survived, including the terra-cotta relief plaque shown below, which dates between c. 2250 and c. 1900 BCE. You may notice that the bull’s rather unnaturally contorted posture in the relief resembles the shape of Taurus, with the bull’s hindlegs splayed in a V-shape resembling the “horns” of the modern constellation.
The Sumerian story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s battle with the Bull of Heaven was later incorporated into the Standard Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh, which the Babylonian scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni compiled sometime between c. 1300 and c. 1000 BCE and which is now considered a classic of world literature (although, as I discuss in this post from September 2022, it is not the oldest surviving work of literature).
In the Standard Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh and Enkidu are implied to be lovers, and Gilgamesh feels inconsolable grief over Enkidu’s death. Confronted with his own mortality, he goes on a quest to find Uta-napishtim, the survivor of an ancient global flood, in the hope of finding the secret of eternal life. In the end, Gilgamesh fails in his quest, finding that eternal life is forever out of reach.
ABOVE: Ancient Mesopotamian terra-cotta relief plaque dated between c. 2250 and c. 1900 BCE, now held in the Royal Museums of Art and History, depicting Gilgamesh slaying the Bull of Heaven
The Nebra sky disk’s depiction of the Pleiades as a cluster of seven stars
The Sumerians were not the only ancient people for whom the Taurus-Pleiades star group held some significance. The Nebra sky disk, which was found in a hoard alongside other objects near the town of Nebra in the German state of Sachsen-Anhalt, is a bronze disk that is dated between c. 1800 and c. 1600 BCE and associated with the Únětice archaeological culture. The disk, which evidently represents the sky, bears celestial bodies inlaid in gold, which include a large circle (most likely either the sun or full moon), a crescent moon, and the Pleiades as a cluster of seven dots.
The Nebra disk shows that Pleiades were important in the Bronze Age culture in what is now Germany and that people in that culture already conceived of the Pleiades as consisting of seven stars. Since the Lascaux cave painting shows the Pleiades with only six stars, the Nebra disk is the oldest surviving unambiguous artistic depiction of the Pleiades with seven stars.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of the Nebra sky disk, dated between c. 1800 and c. 1600 BCE, depicting the sun, moon, and Pleiades
Ancient Greek myths about the Pleiades
The ancient Greeks identified the Pleiades as the seven daughters of the Titan Atlas and his consort Pleione. The early Greek hexameter poem Works and Days, which is attributed to the poet Hesiodos (Hesiod) of Askre and most likely dates to the first half of the seventh century BCE, references the Pleiades and the important role they played in keeping track of the seasons (WD 618–623):
εἰ δέ σε ναυτιλίης δυσπεμφέλου ἵμερος αἱρεῖ,
εὖτʼ ἂν Πληιάδες σθένος ὄβριμον Ὠαρίωνος
φεύγουσαι πίπτωσιν ἐς ἠεροειδέα πόντον,
δὴ τότε παντοίων ἀνέμων θυίουσιν ἀῆται·
καὶ τότε μηκέτι νῆας ἔχειν ἐνὶ οἴνοπι πόντῳ,
γῆν ἐργάζεσθαι μεμνημένος, ὥς σε κελεύω.
But, if a yearning for stormy sailing seizes you
when the Pleiades flee the might of strong Orion
and plunge into the dark sea,
and the blasts of all winds are raging,
then do not have your ship on the wine-faced sea,
but remember to work the land, as I command you.
The Midnight Poem, an early Greek lyric fragment, which is preserved through quotation by the second-century CE grammarian Hephaistion in his Handbook on Meters 11.5 (p. 37 Consbruch) and is usually thought to be the work of the lyric poet Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE), mentions the Pleiades in its beautiful evocation of nocturnal loneliness:
Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ Πληΐαδες, μέσαι δέ
νύκτες, πάρα δ’ ἔρχετ’ ὤρα,
ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.
The moon has set,
and the Pleiades. It is
midnight, and time is passing by.
But I lie alone.
The early Greek historian Hellanikos of Lesbos (lived c. 490 – c. 405 BCE) wrote at least thirty works dealing with history, genealogy, and chronology, including a work titled Atlantika, which was an account of the genealogy of the daughters of Atlas. This work itself has not survived, but the D scholion to the Iliad 18.486c reports that, in it, Hellanikos recorded a myth (fr. 19 Fowler; EGM 2.417–8) to explain why, although there were traditionally said to be seven Pleiades, only six of them were clearly visible. According to the D scholion’s summary of Hellanikos’s lost account, six of the Pleiades had sex with gods, but the seventh, Merope, had sex with Sisyphos, a mortal, which is the reason why she appears faint in the sky.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1084, a second-century CE papyrus fragment bearing a portion of text from Hellanikos’s Atlantika, which is the oldest source known to have mentioned the story of the “lost Pleiad”
The Hellenistic didactic poet Aratos of Soloi (lived c. c. 315 – c. 240 BCE) describes the Pleiades in his poem Phainomena 254–267 and comments on the fact that, although they are traditionally said to be seven, only six are visible:
ἄγχι δέ οἱ σκαιῆς ἐπιγουνίδος ἤλιθα πᾶσαι
Πληϊάδες φορέονται. ὁ δʼ οὐ μάλα πολλὸς ἁπάσας
χῶρος ἔχει, καὶ δʼ αὐταὶ ἐπισκέψασθαι ἀφαυραί.
ἑπτάποροι δὴ ταί γε μετʼ ἀνθρώπους ὑδέονται,
ἓξ οἶαί περ ἐοῦσαι ἐπόψιαι ὀφθαλμοῖσιν.
οὐ μέν πως ἀπόλωλεν ἀπευθὴς ἐκ Διὸς ἀστήρ,
ἐξ αὗ καὶ γενεῆθεν ἀκούομεν, ἀλλὰ μάλʼ αὕτως
εἴρεται. ἑπτὰ δʼ ἐκεῖναι ἐπιρρήδην καλέονται
Ἀλκυόνη Μερόπη τε Κελαινώ τʼ Ἠλέκτρη τε
καὶ Στερόπη καὶ Τηϋγέτη καὶ πότνια Μαῖα.
αἱ μὲν ὁμῶς ὀλίγαι καὶ ἀφεγγέες, ἀλλʼ ὀνομασταὶ
ἦρι καὶ ἑσπέριαι, Ζεὺς δʼ αἴτιος, εἱλίσσονται,
ὅ σφισι καὶ θέρεος καὶ χείματος ἀρχομένοιο
σημαίνειν ἐκέλευσεν ἐπερχομένου τʼ ἀρότοιο.
And, near his left thigh, the Pleiades are carried, all in a cluster,
and the whole space they have is not very much, and they shine dimly by themselves.
Seven-pathed they are called among humans,
but only six are visible to the eyes.
Not at all has any star been unknowingly destroyed by Zeus
since when we hear from our lineage, but, even so, it is said.
And the seven are called by name:
Alkyone, Merope, Kelaino, Elektre
Sterope, Teygete, and Mistress Maia.
They are similarly small and dim, but, renowned in name.
They wheel in morning and evening by the will of Zeus,
who commanded them to show the beginning of summer and winter,
and the approach of the harvest.
Several later Roman sources, including the Roman poet Ovid in his Fasti 4.169–178 (dated c. 8 CE), Pseudo-Hyginus’s Fabulae 192 (dated second century CE), and Pseudo-Hyginus’s Astronomica 2.21 (also dated second century CE), repeat Hellanikos’s story that Merope hides her face in shame because she married Sisyphos, a mortal.
Greek sources identifying Taurus as a bull
Early Greek sources contain no mention of the constellation Taurus as a bull. Instead, early Greek poems consistently identify the Hyades star cluster not as a bull’s head, but rather a group of nymphs who are sisters of the Pleiades. A fragment (291 MW) of the Astronomia (a poem in dactylic hexameter that is attributed to Hesiodos and probably dates to around the seventh century BCE) that is preserved through quotation in Theon of Alexandria’s commentary on Aratos’s Phainomena 172 (p. 166.6–10 Martin) describes the Hyades as:
. . . νύμφαι Χαρίτεσσιν ὁμοῖαι,
Φαισύλη ἠδὲ Κορωνὶς ἐυστέφανός τε Κλέεια
Φαιώ θ᾽ ἱμερόεσσα καὶ Εὐδώρη τανύπεπλος,
ἃς Ὑάδας καλέουσιν ἐπὶ χθονὶ φῦλ᾽ ἀνθρώπων
. . . nymphs similar to the Kharites:
Phaisyle, Koronis, well-crowned Kleeia,
lovely Phaio, long-robed Eudore,
whom the races of humans upon the earth call the Hyades
The earliest Greek author who is known to have described Taurus as a bull is the astronomer Eudoxos of Knidos (lived c. 390 – c. 340 BCE) in his treatise Phainomena. Eudoxos relied on Babylonian astronomical sources, and he almost certainly derived the identification of Taurus as a bull from these sources, rather than any earlier Greek tradition.
Although Eudoxos’s Phainomena has not survived to the present day, Aratos’s Phainomena, which has survived, is largely a poetic adaptation of it. Aratos describes Taurus as follows (lines 167–178), relying on Eudoxos’s earlier description:
πὰρ ποσὶ δʼ Ἡνιόχου κεραὸν πεπτηότα Ταῦρον
μαίεσθαι. τὰ δέ οἱ μάλʼ έοικότα σήματα κεῖται·
τοίη οἱ κεφαλὴ διακέκριται· οὐδέ τις ἄλλῳ
σήματι τεκμήραιτο κάρη βοός, οἷά μιν αὐτοὶ
ἀστέρες ἀμφοτέρωθεν ἑλισσόμενοι τυπόωσιν.
καὶ λίην κείνων ὄνομʼ εἴρεται, οὐδέ τοι αὕτως
νήκουστοι Ὑάδες. ταὶ μέν ῥʼ ἐπὶ παντὶ μετώπῳ
Ταύρου βεβλέαται· λαιοῦ δὲ κεράατος ἄκρον
καὶ πόδα δεξιτερὸν παρακειμένου Ἡνιόχοιο
εἷς ἀστὴρ ἐπέχει· συνεληλάμενοι δὲ φέρονται,
ἀλλʼ αἰεὶ Ταῦρος προφερέστερος Ἡνιόχοιο
εἰς ἑτέρην καταβῆναι, ὁμηλυσίῃ περ ἀνελθών.
By the feet of the Charioteer [Auriga], look for the crouching, horned Bull [Taurus].
And his signs are very lifelike.
His head is so clearly distinguished. One would not
mark the head of an ox with any other sign, since those
stars, by wheeling around it, shape it.
And the name of these is often spoken, and not at all
unheard of are the Hyades. They are set in the mid-forehead
of the Bull. One star makes up the peak of his left horn
and the right foot of the nearby Charioteer.
They are carried together in their course,
but the Bull is always ahead of the Charioteer
to set in the west, although they rise in company.
It is from Eudoxos and Aratos’s descriptions that later Greek and Roman authors drew the tradition of identifying Taurus as a bull, which has remained canonical in western astronomy and astrology ever since.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons showing the depiction of Taurus as a bull in the Dendera zodiac, a star map carved in bas-relief on the ceiling of the portico of the Osiris chapel of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, Upper Egypt, dated c. 50 BCE
The “lost Pleiad” in the post-classical western tradition
The tradition of the “lost Pleiad,” which is mentioned in the works of Hellanikos, Aratos, Ovid, and Pseudo-Hyginus, was popular among nineteenth-century poets and artists. Edgar Allan Poe references the tradition briefly in his 1831 poem “Israfel,” and Emily Dickinson (lived 1830 – 1886) wrote a poem which uses the story of the missing Pleiad as a metaphor for the feeling of missing a friend:
I had a star in heaven;
One Pleiad was its name,
And when I was not heeding
It wandered from the same.
And though the skies are crowded,
And all the night ashine,
I do not care about it,
Since none of them are mine.My story has a moral:
I have a missing friend,—
Pleiad its name, and robin,
And guinea in the sand,—
And when this mournful ditty,
Accompanied with tear,
Shall meet the eye of traitor
In country far from here,
Grant that repentance solemn
May seize upon his mind,
And he no consolation
Beneath the sun may find.
The French Academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (lived 1825 – 1905) made a painting in 1884 titled L’Etoile Perdue (The Lost Star), which depicts the nude Merope separated from her sisters, gazing back at them forlorn.
ABOVE: William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s 1884 painting L’Etoile Perdue (The Lost Star)
Stories about the “lost Pleiad” in Indigenous Australian and Native American traditions
The western tradition identifying the Pleiades as seven stars dates back at least 3,600 years to the time of the Nebra sky disk, the tradition identifying them as sisters dates back at least 2,700 years to the time of Hesiodos, and the myth of the “lost Pleiad” dates back at least 2,500 years to the time of Hellanikos, but, curiously, similar stories occur in the myth traditions of Indigenous peoples around the world, who had no contact with westerners until early modern times.
The songline traditions of the Aboriginal people of Australia’s Western Desert cultural bloc identify the Pleiades as seven sisters and the constellation Orion as a male hunter who pursues the sisters out of lust. In some songlines, the hunter catches one of the sisters and rapes her, which explains why she is not easily visible in the sky. The similarity between this tradition and the Greek tradition—mentioned in the passage quoted from Hesiodos’s Works and Days above—that the Pleiades “flee the might of strong Orion” is striking.
Different Aboriginal groups call the seven sisters and the hunter who pursues them by different names. For instance, the Martu people call the sisters the Minyipuru and the hunter Yurla, while the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara people call the sisters Kungkarangkalpa and the hunter Wati Nyiru. These groups agree, however, on the essential outline of the story, which has enormous importance in many Aboriginal cultures.
The National Museum Australia had an international exhibition titled “Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters,” which features art, music, and stories related to the Seven Sisters songline, and a 2013 performance of the Aṉangu Kungkarangkalpa songline, performed by tribal elders, is posted on YouTube.
Most North American Indigenous traditions identify the Pleiades as siblings, but they disagree about whether they are brothers or sisters. Indigenous groups in eastern North America tend to identify the Pleiades as brothers, while those in western Northern America tend to identify them as sisters.
For instance, the people of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederation, which controlled a large part of what is now the northeastern United States and parts of Ontario in the years just before European colonization, tell a story that the Pleiades were once seven boys who went to dance on a hill. Six of the boys danced, while the seventh one sang, and the six boys who were dancing moved so quickly and nimbly that they floated into the sky and became stars.
The Cherokee, whose homeland before European colonization covered what is now western North Carolina, South Carolina, northeastern Georgia, and eastern Tennessee, tell a story that the Pleiades were seven boys who wouldn’t do their chores and ran around in a ceremonial ball court so quickly so many times that they floated into the sky. The boys’ mother caught one of them and pulled him down to earth so hard that he fell into the ground, but the other six boys rose into the sky and became stars.
The Nez Perce, whose traditional homeland covers the southeastern Columbia River Plateau in the Pacific Northwest, tell a story that the Pleiades were seven sisters. One of these sisters fell in love with a mortal man. The man she loved died, and she was so devastated that she told her sisters, who mocked her for falling in love with a mortal. She became so ashamed that she pulled the sky itself over her like a veil and hid herself from the world. This story closely resembles Hellanikos’s etiology that Merope hides herself out of shame because of her marriage to the mortal Sisyphos.
The Norrises’ argument
In 2021, two Australian astrophysicists, Ray P. Norris and Barnaby R. M. Norris, published a chapter in an edited volume that seeks to answer the question of how different peoples who lived on different continents and did not have contact with each other could have come to tell such similar stories about the Pleiades.
In particular, the Norrises sought to explain the fact that, although most people can only see six stars in the Pleiades, so many traditions around the world maintain that there are seven and have come up with mythic explanations for why one of them is not visible.
The Norrises argue based on astronomical calculations that, around 100,000 years ago, when the ancestors of all people alive today were still living together in Africa, two stars in the Pleiades cluster, Atlas and Pleione, were further apart than they are today (Norris & Norris 2021, 232–234). Today, these stars are not easily distinguishable as separate with the naked eye, but, 100,000 years ago, they would have been more clearly distinguishable.
Based on this, the Norrises argue that the myth tradition identifying the Pleiades as seven sisters dates back around 100,000 years to the time when the ancestors of all people alive today were living together in Africa. It’s a moving idea, and I honestly wish that it was true, but, unfortunately, it probably isn’t.
ABOVE: Color-composite photo from Wikimedia Commons showing the Pleiades, as imaged in the Digitized Sky Survey
How far back in time can we trace ideas?
As I understand it, the Norrises’ astronomical calculations about the positions of the Pleiades 100,000 years ago are sound, but the Norrises are not historians or anthropologists, and their arguments have some significant flaws from a historical and anthropological perspective. To make a point, I’d like to turn to the field of comparative linguistics, which has been dealing for two centuries with the question of how far we can trace back ideas (words) using the comparative method in the absence of written sources.
Most languages that have been historically spoken in Europe and South Asia, including the Anatolian languages (e.g., Hittite and Luwian), the Indo-Iranian languages (e.g., Sanskrit and all its descendants and Old Iranian and all its descendants), Greek, Phrygian, Thrakian, Dakian, Albanian, Armenian, the Italic languages (e.g., Latin and all its descendants), the Germanic languages (e.g., German, Dutch, English, and Old Norse), the Celtic languages (e.g., Gaulish, Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Irish), the Baltic languages (e.g., Lithuanian and Latvian), and the Slavic languages (e.g., Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian), belong to the Indo-European language family.
All the languages in this family are descended from a common ancestor, which linguists call Proto-Indo-European. Scholars now widely believe that the speakers of late Proto-Indo-European were the people of the Yamnaya archaeological culture, who lived as nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists in the Pontic-Caspian steppe (what is now Ukraine and southern Russia) from around 3300 to 2600 BCE.
The Proto-Indo-European language is not attested in writing, but linguists have been able to reconstruct much of its vocabulary, morphology, and basic grammar by comparing the languages descended from it, with some priority emphasis on the oldest attested Indo-European languages, which are Hittite, Luwian, Vedic Sanskrit, Old Avestan, and Mycenaean Greek, all of which are attested in surviving texts from the second millennium BCE.
Linguists have been able to reconstruct aspects of the culture of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European based on the things they had words for. For instance, Proto-Indo-European included words for “boat” (*néh₂us), “copper” (*h₂éyos), “horse” (*h₁éḱwos), “wheel” (*kʷékʷlos), and “wool” (*h₂wĺ̥h₁neh₂), which show that its speakers were familiar with these things. Linguists have even reconstructed the names and basic attributes of a handful of Proto-Indo-European deities, such as the patriarchal god of the daylit sky *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr (whose name means “Sky Father”) and a beautiful, promiscuous dawn goddess named *H₂éwsōs.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the spread of the Indo-European-language-speaking Yamnaya-related peoples across Eurasia over the third and second millennia BCE
Proto-Indo-European is the most thoroughly studied and reconstructed proto-language, but linguists have also identified another proto-language that is far more ancient: Proto-Afroasiatic, which is the common ancestor of most languages that are historically attested in North Africa and West Asia, including Ancient Egyptian, the Semitic languages (e.g., Akkadian, Eblaite, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Geʿez), the Amazigh or Berber languages (e.g., Tashlhiyt, Kabyle, Central Atlas Tamazight, Tarifit, and Shawiya), the Chadic languages (e.g., Hausa, Bade, and Bura), the Cushitic languages (e.g., Oromo, Beja, Sidama, and Afar), and the Omitic languages (e.g., Somali and Wolaitta).
Comparative linguists disagree about exactly where and when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken, but most agree it was spoken somewhere in North Africa or West Asia at some point between c. 16,000 and c. 8000 BCE. Because Proto-Afroasiatic is so much older than Proto-Indo-European, linguists have not been able to reconstruct it to nearly the same degree, but they have reconstructed with moderate confidence a very small handful of Proto-Afroasiatic words, such as *ʔanāku (the first-person singular pronoun “I”), *ʔab- (“father”), and *ʔim- (“mother”).
As it happens, the name Taurus may ultimately derive from the Proto-Afroasiatic word for bull. The English name for the constellation comes from the Latin word taurus meaning “bull,” which is derived (through Proto-Italic) from the Proto-Indo-European word *táwros, which had the same meaning. Other reflexes of this root include Ancient Greek ταῦρος (taûros), Proto-Celtic *tarwos, and Proto-Germanic *steuraz, which is the root of the English word steer.
But *táwros is one of the very few words that scholars believe entered Proto-Indo-European as a loanword from Proto-Semitic (Mallory & Adams 1997, 135). It is probably derived, either directly or indirectly, from the Proto-Semitic root *ṯawr-, which also means “bull” and is the etymological root of Akkadian šūrum, Eblaite šu-lum, Hebrew שׁוֹר (šōr), Aramaic תַּוְרָא (tawrā), and Arabic ṯawr, all of which mean “bull” or “ox.”
As it happens, non-Semitic Afroasiatic languages contain words for bull that seem to be cognate to the Proto-Semitic root *ṯawr-, such as Egyptian šsr, Proto-Berber *a-zgər, Tsamai sawro, and Bura čiwar̃. This may indicate that Proto-Semitic *ṯawr- is derived from an even older root in Proto-Afroasiatic.
We can’t be certain of this, though, since the word for bull in Afroasiatic languages could alternatively be a wanderwort (a word that spreads through linguistic borrowing into many different languages across a broad geographic area), and its widespread appearance in so many different languages may be the result of prehistoric borrowing rather than common descent.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the present-day geographic distribution of Afro-Asiatic languages
In any case, Proto-Afroasiatic shows that it is possible for linguists to trace the histories of a very small number of basic words that survive in certain languages today back to over 10,000 years ago. But this is the absolute furthest back that linguists can trace any words using the comparative method, since languages that are removed from each other by greater spans of time are so different from each other that it is impossible to detect their relationship. All languages and cultures change over time, and the natural tendency is for languages and cultures that are removed from contact with each other to drift apart.
Linguistics also provides us with cautionary tales about assuming that similarities across cultures must be the result of shared histories. To give a famous example, the word meaning “dog” in the Aboriginal Australian language Mbabaram, which was spoken by the Mbabaram people of northern Queensland, is dog, which is pronounced exactly the same as the English word dog. Despite this, the Mbabaram word has no etymological connection whatsoever to the English word. The two languages, which are spoken by different peoples on opposite sides of the planet, simply happened to develop the same word for dog through pure coincidence.
The English word dog derives from late Old English docga, which is of unknown origin, although the ending -ga may have been an Old English diminutive suffix. By contrast, the Mbabaram word dog is related to words for “dog” in other Indigenous Australian languages, such as Djabugay gurraa, Dyirbal guda, Guugu Yimidhirr gudaa, and Yidiny gudaga.
This shows that, sometimes, cultures that have no historical relationship to each other can independently develop similar words through pure coincidence. The same is true for stories. As a result, when comparing words or cultural traditions to each other, we need to consider the chance that the similarities between them are coincidental or a result of parallel circumstances rather than some deeply ancient common inheritance.
ABOVE: Photo from Wikimedia Commons of a dingo, a kind of wild dog native to Australia
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Why our tradition identifying Taurus as a bull is probably not inherited from the Paleolithic
If the Magdalenian people did in fact identify Taurus as an aurochs, the modern identification of the same group of stars as a bull is most likely a coincidence, not a direct inheritance from the Paleolithic.
First, roughly 13,000 years separate the depiction of Taurus as an aurochs in the Lascaux cave and the earliest evidence for the Sumerians identifying Taurus as the “Bull of Heaven.” It’s easy for modern people to put the Lascaux painters and the Sumerians in the same category because they are both “old” from our perspective, but the distance of time between them is over twice the length of time from the oldest proto-cuneiform to the present day. The Sumerians lived much closer to our time than to the time of the Lascaux cave painters. And, in all that time, there is no clear evidence for anyone on earth identifying Taurus as a bull.
Second, modern Europeans are not even descended from the Magdalenian people, but rather from a mixture of three different groups that entered western Europe later, each of whom had a distinct culture and way of life. First, between c. 12,000 and c. 10,000 BCE, a group known as the Western Hunter Gatherers, who originated from the Epigravettian culture in the Balkans and Italy, moved into western Europe, replacing the Magdalenian people. Then, between c. 6700 and c. 4000 BCE, a group known as the Early European Farmers who originated from Anatolia, spread across Europe, largely replacing the Western Hunter Gatherers while picking up some of their genes.
Then, finally, between c. 3000 and c. 2300 BCE, the Yamnaya-related people spread out from the Eurasian steppe, partly replacing and partly mixing with the Early European Farmers. Modern Europeans are descended from these three later groups (Western Hunter Gatherers, Early European Farmers, and Yamnaya-related Western Steppe Herders) and carry very little or no traceable Magdalenian genetic ancestry.
Obviously, stories and cultural traditions can be passed between people who are not genetically related, but the fact that modern Europeans almost entirely trace their descent to other groups that entered western Europe later does make it somewhat less likely that any particular tradition associated with the Magdalenian people could have been passed down continuously until the present.
Third, there is no evidence for any people in Europe in historical times identifying Taurus as a bull except by cultural diffusion from Mesopotamia, since the Greeks got the tradition of Taurus as a bull from the Babylonians, who got it from the Sumerians. The Sumerians, however, had absolutely no relationship or connection to the painters of the Lascaux cave and lived a whole continent away. According to Google Maps, the most direct overland route from Lascaux, France, to Uruk, Iraq, is about 5,283 kilometers (3,283 miles).
By contrast, the chance that two different people in different cultures at different times looked up at the same constellation and independently interpreted it as a bovine is relatively high. After all, the reason why we call it a bull is because the Sumerians thought it looked like a bull based on its shape, and Aratos specifically comments on how clearly the shape resembled a bull.
Bovines were extremely important in many prehistoric and early historic cultures, including both the Magdalenian culture and ancient Sumer. The Magdalenians spent much of their time hunting aurochs, and the Sumerians spent much of their time raising cattle. It’s fair to say that both peoples would have had bulls on the brain.
Why the story of the “lost Pleiad” probably does not date to the Paleolithic either
The Norrises’ argument that the tradition of the Pleiades as seven sisters may be 100,000 years old faces similar problems, but to a far greater extent. First, I have to stress the unfathomably vast span of time we’re talking about here. We may think, for instance, that the Lascaux cave paintings are unfathomably ancient because they are around 17,000 years old, but those paintings were created much closer to the present day than to the date when Atlas and Pleione were far enough apart to have been clearly visible as separate stars.
In fact, the date that the Norrises are talking about here is nearly twice as ancient as the oldest known figurative artwork (a cave painting at Leang Karampuang on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, dated around 51,200 years ago), nearly six times as ancient as the Lascaux cave paintings, around ten times as ancient as Proto-Afroasiatic, nearly nineteen times as ancient as the oldest proto-cuneiform in ancient Mesopotamia, and nearly twenty-eight times as ancient as the Nebra sky disk.
One hundred thousand years ago is so long ago that anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists aren’t even entirely certain what human communication was like that long ago. We’re certain that humans were fully behaviorally modern by around 70,000 years ago, that they spoke languages that were just as complex, sophisticated, and capable of conveying nuance as those that are spoken all over the world today, and that they told stories, made art, used symbols, decorated their bodies, and practiced rituals just like humans today.
It is less certain to what extent these things were true 100,000 years ago. Humans that long ago most likely had some kind of language, but it might have been simpler than languages we are familiar with today. There are no surviving undisputed works of art from that long ago, although there are incised lines and geometric patterns that may be art.
If one accepts Rappenglück’s interpretation of the Lascaux cave painting, then it is one of the oldest surviving depictions of the Pleiades, if not the oldest, but that painting only shows six stars, and it only takes us back one sixth of the way to 100,000 years ago. The oldest surviving undisputed artistic depiction of the Pleiades with seven stars is the Nebra sky disk, which is only around 3,600 years old—only around 3.6% of the age that the Norrises claim for the story of the seven sisters. Compared to the age that the Norrises are trying to claim for this story, all of the evidence (including the cave painting!) is modern.
Second, the Norrises’ whole argument rests on the assumption that the tradition of the Pleiades being seven stars must be at least as ancient as the last time Atlas and Pleione were far enough apart for a person with average eyesight to distinguish them as separate stars using the naked eye. The problem is that, even today, a person with exceptionally good eyesight who observes the Pleiades on a clear night at a location where there is no light pollution can, in fact, make out more than six stars with the naked eye. In fact, some people can make out as many as eight or nine.
The likelihood that some of our ancestors 4,000 years ago would have been able to see seven stars in the Pleiades is further enhanced by the fact that they would have regularly seen the sky without light pollution and the fact that they most likely had better distance vision on average than people today.
Today, most people who live in western societies spend a large proportion of our time looking at objects (especially screens) up-close. As a result, our eyes have adjusted for up-close vision. In the United States in 1971–1972, the rate of myopia (nearsightedness) among persons aged 12–54 was 25%, but, by 1999–2004, the rate had risen to 42% (Vitale et al. 2009). It has most likely risen even more since then.
By contrast, our ancestors 4,000 years ago wouldn’t have spent nearly as much time looking at things up close and would have spent more time looking at things at greater distances, so they may have been better on average at picking out very distant objects, such as stars.
It’s perfectly conceivable that people in different ancient cultures at different times could have looked up at the Pleiades and made out seven stars. Perhaps only a few people with really good eyesight could see all seven, and most people could only see six, but cultures may have based their traditions on the larger number of stars on the presumption that one star was dim and hard to see.
When it comes to the tradition of the stars being “sisters,” it is perfectly natural for a person who sees a cluster of stars very close together to personify those stars as siblings. Once one has decided to interpret them as siblings, there is at least a fifty-fifty chance they will identify them as sisters. Thus, it is perfectly conceivable that different cultures could have arrived at the tradition of identifying the Pleiades as seven sisters independently of each other.
Furthermore, once one culture began identifying the stars as siblings, the idea could have spread to surrounding cultures. There are, in fact, three very clear loci of cultures with seven sisters traditions: Europe and the Mediterranean, North America, and Australia. Outside of these three regions, stories about the Pleiades as seven sisters are less common.
The fact that most people can only make out six stars, and only a small number of people with very good eyesight can make out a seventh, naturally invites people to make up stories to explain why one of the stars is so dim. Once cultures start inventing stories to explain this fact, a few of these stories are bound to resemble each other purely by coincidence.
Lastly, the idea of Orion as a hunter chasing after the seven sisters only occurs in Greek and Aboriginal Australian traditions and is not nearly as widespread as the general notion of the Pleiades being seven siblings or seven sisters. Furthermore, it is easy to see how the Greeks and Aboriginal Australians could have both derived this idea from observing that Orion appears to “chase” the Pleiades through the sky. It’s not a result of them having some deep, shared prehistory, but rather simply a result of them observing the same stars.
There is no need, then, to reach back to remote prehistory 100,000 years ago to explain why so many cultures around the world identify these stars as seven sisters and tell stories about why one of them is hidden.
Conclusion
The myth of the lost Pleiad is probably not 100,000 years old, but it is still very old compared to other most other stories. The European version of the story is traceable to a 2,500-year-old written source and probably existed much longer than that as an oral tradition. The Indigenous North American and Aboriginal Australian traditions may be just as ancient or even more ancient.
In a way, the fact that so many people in different cultures around the world came up with similar stories independently by observing the same stars says more about our fundamental unity as a species than a 100,000-year-old origin of those stories in Africa would. It’s a reminder that, despite our very different cultures, we all live on the same planet, look up at the same sky, and have similar psychological predispositions.
Whenever I look up at the stars, I think of the countless generations who have looked up at them before me: the early Homo sapiens who camped under them as they made the first bold journey out of Africa, the Lascaux painters who might have used them to keep track of the hunting seasons, the Sumerians who saw in them the story of Enkidu’s death and Gilgamesh’s grief, the lonely Sappho who lay awake under a moonless sky, the Greek astronomer who learned from the Babylonians, the Aboriginal Australians whose songs and dances told of the seven sisters’ harrowing journey, Emily Dickinson’s pining for the star she lost, and so many others.
I think of the countless worlds and lives that came before our own, and the countless ones that will come after we have long returned to the dust.
Works cited
- Black, Jeremy and Anthony Green. 1992. Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary. University of Texas Press.
- Anthony, David W. 2010. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press.
- Mallory, J. P., and D. Q. Adams. 1997. Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. FitzRoy Dearborn Publishers.
- Norris, Ray P., and Barnaby R. M. Norris. 2021. “Why Are There Seven Sisters?” In Advancing Cultural Astronomy: Studies in Honour of Clive Ruggles, edited by Efrosyni Boutsikas, Stephen C. McCluskey, and John Steele, 223–235. Historical & Cultural Astronomy. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64606-6_11
- Rappenglück, Michael A. 1997. “The Pleiades in the ‘Salle de Taureau’, Gotte de Lascaux: Does a Rock Picture in the Cave of Lascaux Show the Open Star Cluster of the Pleiades at the Magdalénien Era (ca. 15.300 BC?” In Actas del IV Congreso de la Seac “Astronomia en la Cultura,” edited by C. Jaschek and F. Atrio Barandela, 217–225. Universidad de Salamanca.
- — 1999. “Palaeolithic timekeepers looking at the golden gate of the ecliptic; the lunar cycle and the Pleiades in the cave of La-Tête-Du-Lion (Ardéche, France) – 21,000 BP.” Earth, Moon and Planets, 85/86, 391–404. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1017069411495
- Rochberg, Francesca. 2004. The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture. Cambridge University Press.
- Vitale, Susan, Robert D. Sperduto, and Frederick L. Ferris. 2009. “Increased prevalence of myopia in the United States between 1971–1972 and 1999–2004”. Archives of Ophthalmology. 127 (12): 1632–9. doi:10.1001/archophthalmol.2009.303.
As always … fascinating!