The Pleiades are a star cluster visible from October to March, and to April in Australia. There are several ancient Aboriginal stories about the Pleiades, which are referred to as the seven sisters. A common thread among these stories is that a hunter, represented by the stars in the Orion constellation, chases the seven sisters across the sky. Meanwhile, in ancient Greece, the Pleiades were the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione. Since Atlas was too busy holding up the sky to protect his daughters from Orion the hunter, Zeus turned them into stars. Eventually, Orion also became stars, so he still pursues them in the sky. The strange confluence of these stories is even stranger when you look up and realize there are only six stars in the Pleiades. There are other ancient tales in different cultures about these stars that also refer to them as seven sisters, but something happened to one of them.
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The last time the ancestors of the Greeks and the Australian Aborigines were together was around 100,000 years ago, when modern humans began to migrate out of Africa. The Australians were quite isolated until the British arrived in 1788. Could the story of the seven sisters have been around that long ago? Of course it could, because the stars were always a great subject to hang a legend on. What drives the idea home, though, is the fact that these stars could easily have been the six sisters, as that’s how many stars you see. The seventh star is Pleione, which is too close to the star Atlas to distinguish it with the naked eye. However, a team of astronomers ran simulations and found that all seven stars would have been easily visible 100,000 years ago. So it’s quite possible that the seven sisters being chased by Orion is the oldest surviving story on earth. Read more about this idea at IFL Science. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: NASA)
Source: neatorama