Paper suggests Seven Sisters myths may date back 100,000 years, when Pleiades had 7 visible stars
michael_nielsen · x · 2026-11-06
Michael Nielsen shares an arXiv paper, "Why are there Seven Sisters?" by Ray and Barnaby Norris, which tackles two puzzles about the Pleiades: why cultures as distant as Australian Aboriginals and Greeks tell strikingly similar myths of seven girls pursued by an Orion figure, and why most cultures call them the "Seven Sisters" when most people can only see six stars.
The authors propose both puzzles can be explained by the stories' great antiquity combined with the stars' proper motion: roughly 100,000 years ago, before modern humans left Africa, seven stars were genuinely visible to the naked eye, and the "seven" label persisted in myth even after the seventh became hard to see. If correct, the myths may predate humanity's out-of-Africa migration — though the authors stress the idea is highly speculative.
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