The beginnings of the history of astronomy go 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 and the asterism Pleiades. An asterism is just a small set of stars in a larger constellation. This one is in the zodiac sign of Taurus. Across the world, the myth surrounding this set of stars revolves around the number seven. Whether it be seven people, seven sisters, or seven objects. But today, when we look up at the Pleiades under dark skies, we can with our eyes see six stars. So why across the world do different cultures all still associate this with the number seven?
Around 100,000 years ago, one star went behind another, making the seven visible stars six. On the Lascaux cave paintings in France, there is a bull with large horns and six dots nearby. This was painted around 50,000 years ago. It would be carefully painted by our great, great ancestors in a much different world than today. This painting reflects the constellation Taurus with the Pleiades situated very close by. 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, in the time of one of the cradles of civilization, Mesopotamia, for the first time, people used writing to record their words and had large-scale agriculture. The writing was called cuneiform, and they wrote about a star catalog, some of which we still use today. Constellations like the bull, the scorpion, and the half goat, half fish Capricornus. They saw a reflection of their own world with kings, legends, and morals written in the night sky. But this marks the beginning of modern astronomy. For most of human history, we did not have writing, and all across the world had different constellation stories, many of which are lost today.
What did our earliest ancestors see in the stars? Did they, too, wish when they saw a shooting star? Although we'll never know what the true beginning of the stories about the night sky was, I'm sure they still had connections with the same things we talk about today. Like Gemini, which represents family bonds or Hercules, the brave warrior protecting people. Perhaps when we look up now, what we see and feel in our hearts mirrors what our great ancestors did as well.
