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‘Seven Sisters’ Myths May Reach Back 100k Years

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Re: ‘Seven Sisters’ Myths May Reach Back 100k Years

#141

Post by spijdar »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #134
generalizations wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was an interesting read. Thanks. I'm not sure how the linked article expresses more than an alternate translation, though. It says that benei doesn't "necessarily" translate to sons, which doesn't rule out the translation but merely suggests an alternative. The word elokim also refers generally to God, as it says, but can be translated differently. It's an interesting alternative, but the claim that the translat…

> how it even does reenforce that idea. It reinforces “Christ as the son of God” because, if the phrase is translated as “sons of God”, that sets a precedent in the Old Testament that God has sons. The Jews do not believe God has sons. Christians do. So it is in the best interest of Christian translators to translate that phrase as “sons of God”. > but the claim that the translation "sons of god" is specifically wron…

> You’ll never see it translated as “sons of God” in a book translated by Jews.

Do the 70 Jewish authors of the Septuagint not count? In the LXX, it clearly reads "οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ Θεοῦ", "the sons of God". The LXX precedes Christianity by quite some time.

Re: ‘Seven Sisters’ Myths May Reach Back 100k Years

#142

Post by comboy »

pegasus wrote: post #138
0_____0 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

idk about you but when i look at it I see 6. been trying to spot #7, no luck so far.

I imagine hunter-gatherers, whose life depended on their eyesight acuity, would be find it easier to spot than most modern humans do.

Plus light pollution and air pollution. Maybe some other changes in the atmosphere. And very careful looking. You don't need lenses, just looking through a hole in a leaf could be helpful.

Re: ‘Seven Sisters’ Myths May Reach Back 100k Years

#143

Post by vivekd »

credit_guy wrote: post #90
sradman wrote: post #58

The Pleiades[1], also known as the Seven Sisters: > It is among the star clusters nearest to Earth... and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky. Only six stars in the cluster are visible to the naked eye yet mythology from several ancient cultures share the idea that one of the seven “sisters" is hidden. The article The world’s oldest story? , originally published in TheConversation [2], state…

Wait a second, this doesn't sound right. According to your wikipedia link, the "Seven Sisters" constellation actually has 9 stars (named after the 7 sisters + parents). They are all visible with the naked eye.

I wonder if this means there is something we are missing here. Like maybe there was a 10th star in the cluster long ago that for some reason is no visible to us today

Re: ‘Seven Sisters’ Myths May Reach Back 100k Years

#144

Post by ssr2020 »

I found this text from religios text(Islamic) Although the star of Süreyya(pleiades) is many stars, Arabs call Süreyya as a star. It is a community of seven stars. Six of them are visible and one is hidden. People test their eyesight by seeing or not seeing it.

And Islamic history is 1400 years old.

Re: ‘Seven Sisters’ Myths May Reach Back 100k Years

#145

Post by [deleted] »

Bakary wrote: post #93
sundarurfriend wrote: post #44

This reminded me of a theory came up with as a teenager, that the Vaanaraas of Ramayana (a group to which the famous "monkey god" Hanuman belongs) may actually be an early hominid that had ape-like features, that lived in parallel with humans in different territory. They were intelligent enough to help the human princes in their quest, which got them a place in their story - a story which went on to become an oral tr…

I don't think this theory is outlandish, just speculative. That said, given that language itself tends to be hopelessly distorted at such a time-scale there are some significant obstacles to oral histories not getting completely distorted to the point where no original content remains.

[deleted]

Re: ‘Seven Sisters’ Myths May Reach Back 100k Years

#146

Post by throwaway894345 »

mellosouls wrote: post #27

It's a nice theory but sometimes simpler, less glamorous solutions might hold the truth. There are more than 6 "sisters" visible with the naked eye, but most people normally can't see them. It's more believable to me that the "missing" 7th sister is just the brightest of the less visible ones. Those less visible would certainly have been used as a test of prowess for determining the keenest-eyed, especially among ear…

I share your skepticism—myths don’t seem very durable in general. Comparative linguists have reconstructed some proto-info-european myths, but those are probably in the vicinity of 8k years old or perhaps even younger (certainly nowhere near 100k years) and they’re already about as generic as these 7 sisters myths. The only thing that gives me some respite from my skepticism is that celestial myths likely have more durability given the relative stability, ubiquity, and importance of the night sky (it’s one of the strongest cultural touchstones that ancient people had). That said, I have a really hard time believing that even celestial myths have 100k years of durability, and it seems like there must be simpler, more plausible explanations (like yours).

Re: ‘Seven Sisters’ Myths May Reach Back 100k Years

#147

Post by throwaway894345 »

imglorp wrote: post #76
mellosouls wrote: post #27

It's a nice theory but sometimes simpler, less glamorous solutions might hold the truth. There are more than 6 "sisters" visible with the naked eye, but most people normally can't see them. It's more believable to me that the "missing" 7th sister is just the brightest of the less visible ones. Those less visible would certainly have been used as a test of prowess for determining the keenest-eyed, especially among ear…

A third possibility is one of the stars used to be much brighter for whatever reason. Ancient drawings would help locate the 7th star. One would think star charts are a natural subject for inscriptions predating written language.

I would think these astronomers would have considered that possibility. One thing to note is that stars were probably less important prior to the advent of agriculture, at which point tracking the seasons became important.

Re: ‘Seven Sisters’ Myths May Reach Back 100k Years

#148

Post by autocorr »

mellosouls wrote: post #27

It's a nice theory but sometimes simpler, less glamorous solutions might hold the truth. There are more than 6 "sisters" visible with the naked eye, but most people normally can't see them. It's more believable to me that the "missing" 7th sister is just the brightest of the less visible ones. Those less visible would certainly have been used as a test of prowess for determining the keenest-eyed, especially among ear…

Although it would super cool for the story to have a common ancestor across huge swaths of land and time on Earth, I think this has a higher likelihood of being correct.

There are several stars in the 5-6 magnitude range close to the limits of human vision in the Pleiades. Seven is also often a sacred number. We also have precedent for cultures such as the Greeks and Arabs using double stars to test vision, namely Mizar and Alcor[1,2]. The typical limiting magnitude for unaided vision is about 6 under perfect conditions, but some people with exceptional vision can see to mag 7.

So it seems highly plausible that most people could only see six, but they knew there were about 7 because some sharp-eyed people could see them and would tell them so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizar_and_Alcor#Test_of_eyesig... [2] https://www.surveyophthalmol.com/article/S0039-6257(08)00119...

Re: ‘Seven Sisters’ Myths May Reach Back 100k Years

#149

Post by danans »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #44

This reminded me of a theory came up with as a teenager, that the Vaanaraas of Ramayana (a group to which the famous "monkey god" Hanuman belongs) may actually be an early hominid that had ape-like features, that lived in parallel with humans in different territory. They were intelligent enough to help the human princes in their quest, which got them a place in their story - a story which went on to become an oral tr…

> may actually be an early hominid that had ape-like features, that lived in parallel with humans in different territory.

Perhaps, but it's impossible to prove one way or another. More plausibly, they observed that primates possess a type of intelligence of a kind similar to humans, and therefore were readily adaptable to that role in the story.

What we do know is that fantastical characters with human level sentience in the Ramayana exist primarily to engage the audience and to drive forward the epic's central themes of good vs evil. Fantastical creatures are a pattern of this sort of storytelling across the world. Modern storytellers have used the same technique to great effect, like the various species of JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth or George Lucas's Galaxy Far Far Away.

In this way, there is a striking contrast between the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata, despite emerging from the same cultural milieu as the Ramayana, is a complex human sociological drama without clear lines of good and evil. It makes little use of fantastical species, as their presence would detract from the story's fundamentally human themes. The only non human characters of consequence are gods, but even they are far from perfect and instead exhibit the same flaws as the humans.

Re: ‘Seven Sisters’ Myths May Reach Back 100k Years

#150

Post by throwaway894345 »

ncmncm wrote: post #129
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #64

> ... May Reach Back 100k Years Or may not. One important fact: people get accolades and sometimes even direct monetary incentives for finding something that is supposedly "oldest of". Nobody gets famous or rich by revising "oldest of" dates to a more recent timeline.

You miss the point. They could as easily have been seven geese, seven pebbles, seven lakes, seven boats, seven eyes, seven villages, seven brothers... But they are almost everywhere, instead, seven sisters, across ten thousand miles and fifty millennia. If the story is not that old, how did they so frequently turn out sisters? Morphic resonance? Without, you are left with nothing but a mystery. Citing a common tradit…

Maybe there are other traditions where these stars are geese or brothers or villages or starbucks baristas but the authors are cherry-picking those cultures where they are women? Indeed, I would be surprised if there weren’t, and if there really are no other such stories then I would be surprised that the authors don’t mention that explicitly since that would be give enormous weight to their position.

Also, TFA only says that the aboriginal stories seem to predate European contact, but which is more plausible: that we found a story that is ten times older than the oldest previously reconstructed myth or that we were wrong and the aboriginal story is actually influenced directly or transitively by some European culture (or some other culture which had a similar myth)? This depends on the evidence back the “seems to predate European contact” claim.

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