The history of astronomy goes back as far as the beginnings of humankind. The oldest story told of the stars, and perhaps the oldest story to still survive, is that of the seven sisters represented by the asterism Pleiades.
An asterism is just a small set of stars within a larger constellation, and this one is in the zodiac sign of Taurus. Across the world, myths surrounding this cluster revolve around the number seven. Whether it be seven people, seven sisters, or seven objects. But today, when we look up at the Pleiades on a dark night we can usually only make out six stars. So why do so many cultures around the world still associate this with the number seven?
One idea proposes that around 100,000 years ago one star went behind another making the seven visible stars appear as six. One trace of this is the Lascaux cave paintings in France. Painted nearly 17,000 years ago, is a bull with large horns and six dots nearby. This painting reflects the constellation Taurus with the Pleiades situated very close by.
Fast forward to about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, to one of the cradles of civilization: Mesopotamia. Here, for the first time people used writing to record their words alongside the rise of large-scale agriculture. That writing, called cuneiform, includes some of the earliest star catalogs, some of which we still use today. Constellations like the bull, the scorpion, and the half-goat-half-fish capricornus. In these stars they saw a reflection of their own world with kings, legends, and morals written in the night sky. This starts the beginning of modern astronomy.
But for most of human history we did not have writing at all. All across the world people told different constellations stories, many of which are lost today. What did our earliest ancestors see in the stars? Did they, too, make a wish when they saw a shooting star?
Although we'll never know the true origins of the stories about the night sky, I'm sure they still had connections with the same things we still discuss today. Like Gemini, which represents family bonds, or Hercules, the brave warrior protecting people. Maybe that impulse, to find ourselves in the sky, is the oldest story of all, one our ancestors were already telling, long before they had the words to write it down.
