Could the Oldest Human Story Really Be 100,000 Years Old?

For as long as humans have existed, they have looked to the sky. There are thousands and thousands of different myths and legends linked to stars and constellations, but one radical new idea says that one such story could be incredibly old.

The legend is linked to the Pleiades, a set of stars that many cultures call the “Seven Sisters”. But look at them with the naked eye and you’ll only see six; so where’s the seventh star?

Turns out, there are actually seven stars, but two of them are too close to be distinguished nowadays. However, 100,000 years ago, they would have been clearly visible as distinct stars. So, a group of researchers now believes that the “Seven Sisters” name and legends are at least that old.

The Lost Sister

For something this speculative, the idea is surprisingly solid. Most of us think of the stars as fixed points, but they are actually screaming through space at different speeds. This is called proper motion. You don’t see the same sky humans saw 10,000 or 100,000 years ago. You can, however, look at how stars are moving in the sky today and try to back-trace where they would have been in the past.

Ray and Barnaby Norris, a pair of researchers using data from the Gaia space telescope, decided to do just that. They wanted to see what the Pleiades looked like to the first Homo sapiens.