I was surprised they didn't mention the Pleiades constellation in the Star Stories section. Today, only 6 stars can be seen with the naked eye in the constellation. However, both European and Aboriginal traditions describe them as "seven sisters". It could of course be coincidence, but considering the fact that astronomical extrapolation calculates the movement of the stars to indeed have once been visible as seven, it might actually be evidence of a shared story. The maths puts the last period of the Pleiades appearing as seven, at around 100,000 years ago.
And Youtuber Crecganford has a video with well-sourced academic references exploring the idea that The Seven Sisters is humanity's oldest story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qyjKND3dAE
> Its light is dominated by young, hot blue stars, up to 14 of which can be seen with the naked eye depending on local observing conditions and visual acuity of the observer.
Not sure where you got this claim that there are only 6 visible stars
I heard a story about this, but I can't find it on the internet and don't remember the details. Something about someone giving an elder aboriginal glasses, and him saying like "it's better, but I still can't see (thing he used to see, which IIRC was a star) like it used to.
> The maths puts the last period of the Pleiades appearing as seven, at around 100,000 years ago.
So, I'm not entirely sure I follow you, but this is way way before any people were in Tasmania, or even any real evidenced occupation in the southern hemisphere outside Africa.
Are you suggesting the maths is suspect (?!), or that they should have included traditions that can't at all be verified?
> On the North American mainland, populations of mammoths and mastodons were still living as recently as 12,000 years ago; all were gone 1,000 or so years later.
Could be the real life equivalent of a part of the plot of the Three-Body Problem (I've only seen the Tencent series). One of the mechanisms used in the exposition of this problem is a VR game within an planet with alien physics due to the orbital environment surrounding it, and the game's goal of understanding the physics and observed patterns. I think that's the best I can obfuscate it without fully spoiling the plot.
The show is centered around hard science so it can be a little difficult to follow for some, the series is around 30 episodes and it took a while to make some decent progress in the plot. I like it overall, but have a feeling that the Netflix version may not be able to match it, especially when trying to "westernize" it.
> considering the fact that astronomical extrapolation calculates the movement of the stars to indeed have once been visible as seven, it might actually be evidence of a shared story.
That can't be evidence of a shared story, because people are capable of viewing the sky independently.
The fact that both traditions call them "sisters" might be such evidence, but (1) that has nothing to do with how many of them there are; and (2) it is evidence so weak that it's not worth considering at all.
It's more than that. The story of the seven sisters is in many different cultures and the story is usually the same: seven sisters chased into the sky by a hunter. Most also have a story about the seventh sister leaving the sky or simply fading away.
The real evidence is that the same story exists in aboriginal Australian culture, and has been since well before first contact with Europeans. Most likely the story was brought with the aboriginals when they left Africa and has been told ever since.
Seriously, read the Wikipedia article or watch a video about it. It's an extremely interesting topic, and learning about it is a lot more fun than just assuming it's wrong and everyone is stupid.
This article is about a story that could be from 12,000 years ago. But the Gunditjmara people (also from southern Australia) have a much older story from 37,000 years ago about the last eruption of the Budj Bim volcano.
If you liked this article, you might also like the book "The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World" by Patrick Nunn (Bloomsbury, 2018).
This reminds me of the recent New Yorker article on indigenous Pacific Northwest oral histories about climactic flooding that can be directly correlated to ancient written Japanese tsunami records.
Commenter Dobbin in the comments of your link said:
> The seventh sister is observable even in modern times. Among the Greeks, Arabs and Romans, the ability to see the seventh star was used as an eye test to determine ones suitability for certain tasks as a warrior. Stories of the seventh daughter being taken captive no doubt stem from how elusive seeing that seventh star was though some could see ten or more if viewing conditions are good enough. The conjecture about this being a hundred thousand year old story is probably hogwash in order to publish something.
> Among the Greeks, Arabs and Romans, the ability to see the seventh star was used as an eye test to determine ones suitability for certain tasks as a warrior.
How would this work? This is a test that operates on the honor system where it's guaranteed that everyone knows the right answer.
It must either be the case that no problems will arise if people are free to lie about their vision -- in other words, that acuity of vision has nothing to do with performance at the special tasks gated by this test -- or that the appearance of the stars changes day-to-day, so that someone who is known to be able to see all seven is capable of telling the difference between a testee who can also see all seven and a testee who is lying about their ability to do so.
The story of the seventh sister isn’t just about star visibility but also about the coherence of the story across disparate cultures that have been separated for millennia.
Yeah, I caught that too. The coherence breaks apart a bit with Orion being a singular hunter versus the three brothers in a canoe. Though it is interesting that they're all chasing the same set of sisters. I wonder how likely it is that the same type of story developed independently? The human tendency to anthropomorphize the constellations limits the ideas which can be imposed on them. Are there other traditions that call the 7 sisters something else which weren't included in the article?
That one is hard to date precisely though. Especially compared to floods or volcanos. It could be that the stars were still distinguishable 50ka or 30ka
It’s not Greek as the Australian aboriginals also have the same story with the seven sister. It might be a story an ancestor common to both the people in Europe, and the aboriginal Australians shared before they left Africa.
This kind of thing is similar to fortune telling... There are some vague tales that occasionally coincidentally align with geological record, (or can be massaged to resemble another yarn). However there is nothing beyond wishful thinking to show that the tales remained consistent for any length of time, or were based on reality in the first place.
Aboriginal studies is a joke, there is no ability for a critical interpretation to be published, so the entire field has descended into drivel.
It would be interesting to contrast this with a possible theory that Prometheus represents an oral tradition of the first controlled use of fire around 1M years ago.
> However there is nothing beyond wishful thinking to show that the tales remained consistent for any length of time, or were based on reality in the first place.
Is this based on deep research into the matter, full coverage of all academic and non-academic material?
Very much agree, but don't despair: a vast record of this pseudo-rational, pseudo-scientific, and very effective propaganda is digitally archived, just waiting for someone to assemble it into a presentation of how the world really works, a legitimate Theory of Everything, not the bogus one science has sold to an indoctrinated public.
I was just watching a random video on this 4 days ago [1].. The video was published October 19 and the article was published October 19. How odd. They use the same source of information?
Interesting, but could be jumping to conclusions. There could have been other, more recent floods or supernovas or whatever captured by these legends. We are talking about a very long broken telephone game and it's inevitable that some details would get mixed up.
What's fascinating is that it's apparent from these stories that Aboriginal Australians never figured how seeds work, or the link between pregnancy and sex.
“ German folklore held that storks found babies in caves or marshes and brought them to households in a basket on their backs or held in their beaks. These caves contained adebarsteine or "stork stones". The babies would then be given to the mother or dropped down the chimney. Households would notify when they wanted children by placing sweets for the stork on the window sill”
Lacking any further evidence, we must conclude that German people must not know the link between sex and reproduction.
(To be clear — your statement is a very outdated belief)
There's no counterpart to the Genesis myth, nothing like "A went in unto B and she conceived". Children were brought by Rainbow Serpent or some such. Native Australians were on the brink of hunger a lot of the time, so they were only fertile during the seasons of abundant food.
All known Aboriginal practices of growing food involving moving/planting entire plants, not seeds.
That's a broad sweeping statement you'd be hard pressed to prove.
On the flip side you could watch old episodes of, say, Bush Tucker Man and pay attention to the parts in which aboriginal women talk about seeds and putting them back to grow more plants. You might also hit up the archives for old Malcolm Douglas epiosodes.
Or you could go direct to the source and talk to people that never lost connection to the land such as the Birriliburu Rangers, the last of the Pintupi Nine, or any number of communities in the Kimberley.
Next you bring up some Bruce Pascoe stories about fields of grain and permanent dwellings.
Regarding the black bean trees, if this was true, early European explorers would have seen vast orchards of said trees, along with many food-producing ones. What they saw instead was complete refusal to help farm wheat that Aboriginals quickly learned to appreciate, even in the face of famine.
There's no shame in being a hunter gatherer who hasn't yet discovered a lot about nature. We've all been there.
The part you've skipped over and not addressed is direct video recording of aboriginal people living traditional lifestyles talking about propagating and spreading plants.
Especially Bush Tucker Man which was a public facing documentary series running alongside the Australian Army recording traditional food practices and sources for the purposes of keeping soldiers alive in the northern territories of Australia.
This directly contradicts your position that aboriginal people didn't know what seeds did.
How you make such a statement about people that spent several tens of thousands of years in a place watching plants and animals and shaping the environment about them suggest you've not thought this through and likely never lived in aboriginal communities.
CPY people in central Australia practice subincision as a manhood ritual. In order to concieve they tie the penis together with their wives' hair. They only did/do this in times of plenty though. Otherwise the subincision means semen just dribbles down the scrotum, and not into the wife. Seems they knew what went where.
The spirit of a new embryo came from a waterhole, with the help of the Rainbow Serpent. But they knew where babies came from.
Spitting/throwing seeds of fruit on the ground is a lot like planting them.
I know of no evidence that Indigenous Australians were so hungry that they were only sporadically fertile. Source?
For one, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12337490/.
There's plenty of research on mythology of various tribes regarding the matter. Some had various suspicions and practices such as above, none had a consistent viewpoint of fatherhood, semen, conception etc comparable to that of people who observed domesticated animals.
Interesting that you link to one of Gillian's papers, I met her in the 1980s.
From the full paper of the link you gave, regarding traditional method of abortion in Southern Arnhem Land women:
Voluntary controls are of course an important issue in any discussion of overall fertility.
A detailed survey of the available information on contraception, abortion and infanticide among Aborigines has revealed that Aboriginal women saw children as a contingent good (Cowlishaw 1979).
First there were widespread attempts at contraception by taking medicine, performing rituals and avoiding coitus.
Which poses the question, why avoid coitus if there is (as you claim) no understanding of fatherhood and conception.
Hmmm... only read the abstract, but the idea that indigenous australians _in general_ were starving pre-colonisation is demonstrably false, just consider the eel farms and factories in Victoria
How do you think living in balance with the environment looks? It's essentially food equilibrium, as everywhere else in nature. Dry year = death.
Also they were eel traps, not farms or factories, were only available to a miniscule fraction of the tribes and they still were in equilibrium with eel supply.
Agricultural Revolution is not called revolution for nothing, that's basically when human population started growing after millennia of stability caused by equilibrium with food supply (aka hunger).
It's amazing how you went from 'there was no agricultural revolution in Australia' to 'Aboriginal Australians never figured how seeds work, or the link between pregnancy and sex'. I've witnessed firsthand from many – of course, not all – Australians that they are motivated to believe that indigenous Australians are mentally deficient as a way to paper over past atrocities and to justify the degradation and exclusion of them from society.
You might want to give 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' a read, which provides a different and more compelling hypothesis to 'eurasian man smarter' for the beginning of the agricultural revolution.
What is different about Aboriginal Australians (in your mind) that caused you suggest they "never figured how seeds work, or the link between pregnancy and sex"? Do you think it took modern science for humans to make these simple deductions? Tell me your hypothesis.
Just wasn't their time. Modern humans spent about 200k years without figuring it out as well, Australians were not that far behind. The sex-pregnancy link was figured out by observing domestic animals, a luxury they didn't have. They developed (or retained?) unique features too, such as being able to sleep in the open in sub-zero temperatures.
> The sex-pregnancy link was figured out by observing domestic animals, a luxury they didn't have.
You really do live in some far removed fantasy world don't you.
I have rarely met any people that watch and know more about the plants and animals in their environment than australian aboriginals.
They know what feeds on what, when different animals breed, when plants produce fruit, when they pollinate.
You can't hunt kangaroo, for example, without knowing their movement patterns and it's a nice day out watching kangaroos lounge about feeding, mounting, and moving with the sun.
There's entire long standing practices about not hunting where kangaroos breed, etc. to keep numbers up.
The mindset that you've apparently missed is that of "keeping" domestic animals .. it was never a thing to people that were always surrounded by and living in the midst of animals they knew, watched, and knew where to find as needed.
Elcho Islanders don't keep birds in a cage, for example - that's a European thing:
Surely you'd know kangaroos are way more plentiful now that a lot of the forests have been cleared? They sure knew a lot of stuff, but these two they didn't.
Being a hunter-gatherer meant breeding until you match the area's carrying capacity, i.e. adding any more people causes hungry deaths. Aboriginal Australians caused extinctions of quite a few species after their arrival as they were unconsciously searching for the equilibrium.
> Surely you'd know kangaroos are way more plentiful now that a lot of the forests have been cleared?
The forests were cleared before Europeans arrived using bushfires
> Aboriginal Australians caused extinctions of quite a few species after their arrival as they were unconsciously searching for the equilibrium.
This isn’t particular to Australia. Every land where humans appeared, megafauna vanished because they were the easiest thing to hunt and didn’t breed quickly enough.
"Fire stick farming" didn't clear that much. The most fertile lands (i.e. south east) just converted to eucalyptus sclerophyll forests that are easier to hunt in.
Either way my point about equilibrium (that means borderline hunger on average, hungry deaths every few years) stands.
Rituals around coming-of-age, first menstruation etc. also seem to oppose your claim. Plus also: common sense (have sex, pregnancy bump appears, baby comes out). The ability to deduce is common to all humans. If you think that indigenous Australians lack this faculty, that's kind of amazing.
I wonder if they read the paper either, it talks of many things, diet, work levels, nutritional levels, etc.
It does include the extract:
It is the accepted view that huntergatherers in general and Australian Aborigines in particular were neither undernourished nor overworked.
But it is necessary to know more of the balance between work expenditure and nourishment, and the particular qualities of the diet that may have some bearing on fertility.
(Robson, 1975:51)
It's worth giving Dark Emu a (critical) read. It gathers numerous primary sources from early explorers which describe practices of cooperative harvesting, cultivation, and land management between indigenous tribes in Australia. They also had totemic moieties which governed who could conceive together within and between tribes, ostensibly to avoid in-breeding.
The agricultural revolution that spawned from the Indus valley civilisations were dependent on beasts of burden which were lacking in Australia. Though maybe with time something similar might have happened in Australia to, as it did in the Incan empire before it was destroyed by the conquistadors
For anyone interested in the "critical" aspect mentioned by h0l0cube, please consider also reading "Farmers or Hunter-Gatherers? The Dark Emu Debate" by Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe.
Peter Sutton is an anthropologist and linguist (>50 years); Keryn Walshe is an archaeologist (>35 years). Peter Sutton in particular has spent large amounts of time living with indigenous people in the far north. Their book describes many deficiencies in Dark Emu, and also gives a huge amount of interesting information about how aboriginal people lived, and the way they curated the land and the food resources available to them.
For anybody lacking context, ie. those outside Australia, for example,
* Australia has much the same area as mainland USofA (ie. it's big) and spans from the tropical equatorial (northern Australia) to much closer to the south pole (Tasmania).
* Geographic landscapes include: Coastal, Rainforest, forest, river, and desert.
There was (and still remains in some parts of Australia) a wide range of traditional lifestyles, the Murray river (and south western australia, and elsewhere) had extensive multigenerational fish traps - now largely destroyed for paddleboat navigation back in the day.
I've heard Dark Emu has deficiencies, I can't say I've ever read it. There are other books that address pre colonial aboriginal living, pay attention to place and landscape and avoid generalising across a large landmass.
The book has garnered some criticism from experts, which is expected for conjectures where most of the evidence has been destroyed, but I don't believe there's been a complete refutation of his ideas
> Pascoe is a conman.
As per this thread, you've made a lot of claims without sufficient back up, seem somewhat intransigent, and hold very one-sided beliefs. I think a little self-reflection is warranted, especially if your motivation is to convince people you have beyond a superficial understanding on these matters.
For a lot of Pascoe's claim there's direct contradicting evidence, see Keen, Walshe and Sutton. He deliberately forged a lot of his evidence, such as trying to pass Torres Strait huts for mainland Australian, all to boost his name recognition and his Aboriginal food-themed business, therefore conman.
Have you seen them? I won't pretend to have read Walshe and Sutton, but from my cursory understanding of their criticism it's that Pascoe has conflated all indigenous tribes across the continent (not all engage directly in planting), and they used means of cultivating the land that were lower effort (harnessing fire and self-seeding) but still effective (which is much in sympathy with Pascoe's thesis). It certainly doesn't provide evidence that indigenous people didn't understand seeds
So your conjecture is that they did understand seeds, but refused to use them and provide themselves with a relatively care-free way to not die of hunger en masse?
I’ll suggest again to read Guns, Gerns, and Steel. An agricultural revolution is predicated on fertile lands, high yield crops, domestication of docile animals (both for consumption and as beasts of burden), etc. then if those environmental factors are aligned, tools can be made to exploit them. Australia is a mostly arid country, it took the import of overseas animals and crops before western agriculture emerged, but up to that point indigenous Australians had the means to provide for themselves.
From our best understanding of pre colonial life, famine wasn’t a feature of it. Funnily enough it’s post agricultural societies that often died of famine because they enabled huge populations in cities and shifting climate would cause several years of floods and droughts at infrequent and irregular intervals, and at such scale that it couldn’t be planned for by early societies (and maybe we might find out our modern global one still has this flaw)
Maori still managed it without much of the above just next door. Australian lands are so fertile that it half Asia with wheat and meat. Just wasn't their time.
>From our best understanding of pre colonial life, famine wasn’t a feature of it.
Yes it was. Killing over food theft, cannibalism and general hardship are a staple of Aboriginal stories. Agriculture, even early transport, power structures and communication systems made it possible to store and redistribute excess food. A single very dry season in a particular part of Australia meant its inhabitants would have to feed on someone else's land or die trying.
Aboriginals are also way more susceptible to obesity and type 2 diabetes than Europeans, basically lacking European adaptations to abundant food.
Have you even visited Australia, and even slightly outside its cities? And then have you visited New Zealand? To have done so and still believe they are equally fertile would require some incredible cognitive dissonance.
> Australian lands are so fertile that it half Asia with wheat and meat
Modern agriculture is very different to ancient agriculture. We didn't have combine harvesters, high-yield evolved (or GMO) crops, fuel-driven pumps, bores that can collect deep group water, tractors to build irrigation and dams etc. Not sure how you could overlook any of this.
> staple of Aboriginal stories
Citations needed. Won't pretend I'm an expert on this, but I'll wager you aren't either. The risk of famine increases with population, especially a population that isn't self-sufficient. It's a post-agricultural phenomenon, which is not to say a tribe couldn't starve, but it's much harder. There's much evidence to say that cooperation, trade, and intermarriage with neighboring was a significant part of indigenous societies, likely borne out of necessity.
> A single very dry season in a particular part of Australia meant its inhabitants would have to feed on someone else's land or die trying.
Dry seasons were less of a problem than you might think, as indigenous people knew where all the water holes were, and could read the landscape^ to know where to dig to get to water. Not enough for expansive agriculture, but certainly enough to survive in one of the harshest environments in the world.
^ A common painting for central Australian tribes is the 'seed story' where they observe that ants have collected seeds to a location which reveal the location of a 'soakage'. Digging in this area, water can be found.
> way more susceptible to obesity and type 2
Any scientific consensus on this actually being a thing?
I ask rhetorically. There's no point arguing against motivated reasoning. I'm done here. Feel free to have the last word.
I live in Australia and go hunting every few weeks, I've also been to NZ. A lot of land in the middle of Au is sure a barren desert, but so is a lot of land in the Middle East.
Australia was never short on food ever since it started farming, way before any kind of harvesters, deeps wells or GMO crops.
There's a tendency of certain Westerners to consider the myths of others are being more legitimate to the point where (in New Zealand) it's taught in schools alongside "Western" science [1].
> There's a tendency of certain Westerners to consider the myths of others are being more legitimate
I've always considered this is a subtle form of othering in which the cultural left indulges.[1] It's really unfortunate and no less alienating than more obvious forms of othering.
A related phenomenon is the left (as well as non-religious more generally, not all firmly steeped in the leftist milieu) feeling entitled to criticize or diminish otherwise similar religious practices found within the dominant culture they were raised. Standing alone it would fit into a millennia-long vein of intellectual discourse in the West[2], however in contrast to the noble savage gloss given non-Western cultures it becomes intolerably hypocritical.
[1] Relatedly, for years I've considered figurative use of words like "legitimate" and, especially, "authentic" as signaling and reflecting dubious modern cultural value judgments. These modern cultural concepts have been internalized across the political and cultural spectrum in the West, especially the rich West. Learning to spot this language is a good way to identify B.S. in politics, philosophy, business, marketing, and almost every other area of life. (Conversely, when you're feeling evil you can use these words to great profit in rhetoric.) In this case I understand you're deliberately echoing others' verbiage.
As a person who generally identifies as being on the US left, I took it as a factual use of the term, not a personal gripe or ideological battle. To the extent I can even think of people on the "right" doing the equivalent with indigenous cultures, it's in a completely different manner.
I’m not even getting into the accuracy or lack of accuracy of the statement.
Due to the numbers of viewers, if even a fraction of people start posting whatever gripe about left/right that comes to their mind after each comment like here, then this place will be unbearable. Hence the guideline admonishing against that.
Well when put like that, sounds like a terrible conversation piece for socials events, particularly when an 1/3 to 2/3rds belong to the group being griped about. Especially when the gripee is seemingly not even part of that group.
It’s like standing in a group talking and then going: “hey this topic reminds me about how a third of you people, which I’m not one of, do this and this bad thing, isn’t that annoying?! Haha you people”
I think you are right that there is a danger for the left to be biased in this way. Just like there is a strong bias on the right to selectively pick what was part of the "good old times" up to the point where the whole idea becomes complete fiction.
If we engage in a little bit of theological scholarship then it becomes clear why the trust in our own myths can sometimes be low. In the history of Christianity there has been so much political maneuvering and power play involved in the way these myths ought to be told or not told that most people question any truth those myths could hold purely on that fact alone. Then you also have devout Christians who would probably call Jesus if he was reborn today and said precisely what he said in the bible a socialist. So if the long history of the church and its religous wars didn't scare you off, the "Christian Love" of the loudest believers might just do the trick.
With other cultures we don't know all that political bullshit and scheming which mind lurk behind their myth, so we have a different, less negative look at it.
> entitled to criticize or diminish otherwise similar religious practices found within the dominant culture they were raised
Its amazing how the right(or the religious more generally) feel entitled to diminish the self-agency and self-ownership of people who live in the same state as them because they fell they dominate and own the culture that "raises" those people. It reminds me of the certain ideologies that sees the whole chinese diaspora as some how being property of the PRC.
Different dynamics. In NZ it is a state trying to make up to a disadvantaged indigenous population. In Texas, its about a Protestant Christianity brought by settlers and has nothing to do with the state’s ethnic minorities.
Instead, what would be a good comparison in the USA are those Native American activists who insist on the truth of their founding myths that the Creator created them where they live now, and that their ancestors did not migrate from Asia across the Bering Strait.
The Pleiades Folklore Wikipedia page has loads of interesting general info about the constellation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades_in_folklore_and_liter...
And Youtuber Crecganford has a video with well-sourced academic references exploring the idea that The Seven Sisters is humanity's oldest story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qyjKND3dAE