Abstract
No one can say just when human beings first noted five bright “stars” moving among the other stars, the planets, so-called from the Greek word for wanderers. They have been known from time immemorial, though it was only in Greco-Roman times that they received their familiar names: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
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Notes
- 1.
R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 226.
- 2.
Lorna J. Marshall, Nyae Nyae !Kung Beliefs and Rites. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of Archaelogy and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1999, p. 251.
- 3.
Among the Bushmen, only the Nharo, of Botswana, seem to have recognized the solstices.
- 4.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Old Way: a story of the first people. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, pp. 6–7.
- 5.
Thomas, The Old Way, p. 22.
- 6.
Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, p. 218.
- 7.
Thomas, The Old Way, p. 22.
- 8.
According to C.W. Valentine, summarized in: Jeffrey A. Gray, The Psychology of Fear and Stress. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971, pp. 16–18.
- 9.
E.E. Barnard, unpublished manuscript; quoted in William Sheehan, The Immortal Fire Within: the life and work of Edward Emerson Barnard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 340–341.
- 10.
Kelly has coined this word to describe the very strong emotion of some of adoration and attachment to the night sky. He indicates that individuals who experience it tend to have traits of novelty-seeking, sensation-seeking, openness to experience, and enjoyment of effortful cognitive activity, which may indicate a preference for cognitive complexity. See: William E. Kelly, “Getting a Thrill from the Night-sky: the relationship between sensation seeking and Notcaelador,” Psychology Journal, 4, 1 (2007), 40–46.
- 11.
A slight misremembering of Wordsworth here; Prelude, I, 302.
- 12.
The theory was not really verified, however, until deep-ocean cores became available. See: J.D. Hays, J. Imbrie, and N.J. Shackleton, “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages,” Science, 194 (1976), 1121–1132.
- 13.
Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, p. 18. Clearly, the Mammoth Steppe was a frigid desert – rather like Mars – a desert of extreme dryness and cloudless skies. It must have been more forlorn and monotonous than the bleak scene described in the verse from Wordsworth’s Excursion – “… moon and stars/Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven/when winds are blowing strong” – since there were rarely clouds for the moon and stars to glide among.
- 14.
Ian Tattersall and Jeffrey Schwartz, Extinct Humans. New York: Westview Press, 2000, p. 247.
- 15.
Perhaps their emigration was aided by the appearance of a favorably mutated gene for the human dopamine D4 receptor linked to novelty-seeking and risk-taking (also, alas, in modern settings, to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and addictions) that increased the odds of their embarking on this great and dangerous migratory adventure. An analysis of genetic variations suggests that this mutation occurred recently – within the last 40,000 years; under the challenging conditions of life in the Ice Age, the mutation apparently conferred a significant advantage since its prevalence increased. See Yuan-Chun Ding, Han-Chang Chi, Deborah L. Grady, Atsuyuki Morishima, Judith R. Kidd, Kenneth K. Kidd, Pamela Floodman, M. Anne Spence, Sabrina Schuck, James M. Swanson, Ya-Ping Zhang, and Robert K. Moyzis, Evidence of positive selection acting at the human dopamine receptor D4 gene locus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, vol. 99, no. 1 (January 8, 2002), 309–314.
- 16.
According to mitochondrial DNA dating. Russell Thomson et al., “Recent common ancestry of human Y chromosomes: evidence from DNA sequence data,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.) 97;13:7360–7365 (20 June 2000). These authors state that their results indicate that “movement out of Africa occurred around 47,000 years ago. The age of mutation 2, at around 40,000 years ago, represents an estimate of the time of the beginning of global expansion.” This was during the depths of the Ice Age, when continental glaciers were advancing across Europe and severely affecting climate not only in higher latitudes but in the tropics as well. The tropical deep Atlantic Ocean cooled 4°C on average during the last glacial maximum, and the cold ocean currents drew moisture-laden air off the African continent.
- 17.
Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, p. 221.
- 18.
See, for instance, D. Kimura, Sex and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999, and S. Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference: the truth about the male and female brain. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
- 19.
A recent model with possible relevance to the conditions of life during the Pleistocene is that of the Inuit, among whom the food supply was rarely dependable enough to allow them to settle in one place for long and whose population density was very low (approximately 0.03 persons/kilometer in Canada and only slightly higher in Alaska). Factors helping to maintain stability of population size included predation, starvation, disease, accidents, and social mortality (including suicides and murders). Among Inuit males, the major cause of natural death was accidents – hunting accidents among men accounting for 15% of deaths of a southern Baffin Island group. See: William B. Kemp, “The Flow of Energy in a Hunting Society.” Scientific American, 225, 3 (1971), 104–115.
- 20.
Paul G. Bahn, Journey Through the Ice Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, p. 17.
- 21.
Quoted in David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the origin of art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002, p. 31.
- 22.
J-M. Chauvet, E.B. Deschamps, and C. Hilaire, Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave. London: Thames & Hudson. 1996, pp. 41–42.
- 23.
Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A new theory of religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
- 24.
Pablo Picasso; quoted in R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, p. 134.
- 25.
Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, p. 12.
- 26.
ibid., p. 397.
- 27.
Paul G. Bahn and Jean Vertut, Journey Through the Ice Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997, p. 205. The reference is to: Frolov, B.A. Numbers in Paleolithic graphic art and the initial stages in the development of mathematics. Soviet Anthropology and Archaeology, 16, 1977/1978, 142–166.
- 28.
Quoted in Mario Ruspoli, The Cave of Lascaux: the final photographs. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1987, pp. 63–64.
- 29.
Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, p. 268.
- 30.
Bradley E. Schaefer, “The Origin of the Greek constellations,” Scientific American, November 2006, 96–101:98. I’m reminded of what Winston Churchill said on a visit to Lick Observatory: “We all know how astronomers have mapped the heavens out in the shape of animals. We can most of us – by a stretch of the imagination – recognize the Great Bear, but still one quite sympathizes with those who call it The Plough. Bear or Plough – one is like it as the other.”
- 31.
Jean Clottes, Chauvet Cave: the art of earliest times. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2003, p. 100.
- 32.
Quoted in Wendell Berry, “Think Little,” in: A Continuous Harmony: essays cultural and agricultural. Washington, DC: Shoemaker and Hoard, 1972, p. 82.
- 33.
Quoted in James Harford, Korolev: how one man masterminded the Soviet drive to beat America to the Moon. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997, p. 17.
- 34.
Franz Boas, “The Central Eskimo,” Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethology, Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888.
- 35.
Mark Watts to William Sheehan; personal communication, December 4, 2006.
- 36.
Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: archaic techniques of ecstasy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964.
- 37.
Ethnographer Mark Watts has made a close study of the “rainbow arch” panel at Utah’s Rochester Creek. He writes (personal communication, December 4, 2006): “The panel I have been focusing on for the past year is one of several that I’ll feature in Journey of the Hero Twins, a book on Native American genesis myths and associated sky-lore…. This detail shows the Twins’ father sitting just below the arch, who, according to the myth, is Sky…. In the schematic view of the heavens revealed by the myth (and the prior work of Jon Polansky) this figure occupies the position of Vega, suggesting the myth contains some memory of the time when Vega was ‘father of the sky.’ In about 13,000 BC Vega spun around the celestial pole ‘held’ by one of the smaller stars in Lyra, a ‘star-on-a-string.’”
- 38.
Paul Fussell, The Great War in Modern Memory. London: Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 127.
- 39.
Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology: the Masks of God. New York: Penguin, 1998, p. 6.
- 40.
Michael Wood, In Search of the Trojan War. New York: Facts-on-File, 1985, p. 57.
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Sheehan, W. (2010). Nomads. In: A Passion for the Planets. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5971-3_3
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