Abstract
There are two puzzles surrounding the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. First, why are the mythological stories surrounding them, typically involving seven young girls being chased by a man associated with the constellation Orion, so similar in vastly separated cultures, such as the Australian Aboriginal cultures and Greek mythology? Second, why do most cultures call them “Seven Sisters” even though most people with good eyesight see only six stars? Here I show that both these puzzles may be explained by a combination of the great antiquity of the stories combined with the proper motion of the stars, and that these stories may predate the departure of most modern humans out of Africa around 100,000 BC.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen, R. H. (1899). Star names and their meanings. New York, Leipzig: G.E. Stechert.
Ammarell, G., & Tsing, A. L. (2015). Cultural production of Skylore in Indonesia. In Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy (pp. 2207–2214). New York: Springer.
Andrews, M. (2005). The seven sisters of the pleiades. Melbourne: Spinifex Press.
Avilin, T. (1998). The Pleiades in the Belarusian tradition: folklore texts and linguistic areal studies. Folklore, 72, 141–158.
Bates, D. (1925). Selected papers, Serial VII, Ref 25 (pp. 85–88). Canberra: NLA.
Bowler, J., Johnston, H., Olley, J., et al. (2003). New ages for human occupation and climatic change at Lake Mungo, Australia. Nature, 421, 837.
Burnham, R., Jr. (1978). Burnham’s Celestial Handbook: An Observer’s Guide to the Universe Beyond the Solar System. New York: Dover Publications.
Clarke, P. A. (2009). An overview of Australian Aboriginal ethnoastronomy. Archaeoastronomy, 21, 39–58.
Converse, J. M., & Stahler, S. W. (2010). The dynamical evolution of the Pleiades. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 405, 666.
Davis, S. (1989). Man of all seasons. An Aboriginal perspective of the natural environment. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Dawson, J. (1881). Australian aborigines. Melbourne: Robertson.
Dempsey, F. (2009). Aboriginal sky lore of the pleiades star group in North America. Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, 103, 233.
Ehser, A., Borg, G., & Pernicka, E. (2011). Provenance of the gold of the early bronze age nebra sky disk, central Germany. European Journal of Mineralogy, 23(6), 895–910.
Fuller, R. S., Norris, R. P., & Trudgett, M. (2014). The astronomy of the Kamilaroi people and their neighbours. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2014(1), 1.
Gell, J. P. (1842). The vocabulary of the Adelaide tribe. Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science, Agriculture, Statistics, 1, 109.
Gibson, S. (2017). The Pleiades. Retrieved from http://www.naic.edu/gibson/pleiades/.
Ginis, H., Perez, G. M., Bueno, J. M., & Artal, P. (2012). The wide-angle point spread function of the human eye reconstructed by a new optical method. Journal of Vision, 12(3), 20, 1–10.
Harney, W. E. (1959). Tales from the aborigines. Adelaide: Rigby.
Harney, W. E. (1963). To ayers rock and beyond. London: Robert Hale.
Harvati, K., Roding, C., Bosman, A. M., et al. (2019). Apidima Cave fossils provide earliest evidence of Homo sapiens in Eurasia. Nature, 571, 500–504.
Heifetz, M., & Tirion, W. (2004). A walk through the heavens: A guide to stars and constellations and their legends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hertzog, K. P. (1987). Ancient stellar anomalies. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 28, 27.
Hudjashov, G., et al. (2007). Revealing the prehistoric settlement of Australia by Y chromosome and mtDNA analysis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 8726.
Johnson, D. (2011). Interpretations of the pleiades in australian aboriginal astronomies. IAU Symposium No, 278, 291.
King, B. (2014). How many pleiades can you see. Sky and Telescope, 2014, 22.
Krupp, E. (1991). Seven sisters. Griffith Observer, 55, 1.
Krupp, E. (1994). Echoes of the ancient skies. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Kyselka, W. (1993). On the rising of the pleiades. Hawaiian Journal of History, 27, 174.
Langer, N. (2012). Presupernova evolution of massive single and binary stars. Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 50, 107–164.
Maegraith, B. G. (1932). The astronomy of the Aranda and Luritja tribes. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, 56, 19–26.
Massola, A. (1968). Bunjil’s cave. Melbourne: Lansdowne Press.
Mathews, J., & White, I. (1994). The opal that turned into fire: and other stories from the Wangkumara. Broome: Magabala Books.
McNiven, I. J., & Russell, L. (2005). Appropriated pasts: Indigenous peoples and the colonial culture of archaeology. Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira Press.
Melis, C., Reid, M. J., Mioduszewski, A. J., Stauffer, J. R., & Bower, G. C. (2014). A VLBI resolution of the Pleiades distance controversy. Science, 345, 1029–1032.
Mountford, C. P. (1939). An anyamatana legend of the pleiades. Victorian Naturalist, 56, 103.
Mountford, C. P. (1976). Nomads of the Australian Desert. Adelaide: Rigby.
Nagle, N., van Oven, M., Wilcox, S., van Holst Pellekaan, S., Tyler-Smith, C., Xue, Y., et al. (2017). Aboriginal Australian mitochondrial genome variation an increased understanding of population antiquity and diversity. Nature Scientific Reports, 7, 43041.
Norris, R. P. (2008). Searching for the astronomy of aboriginal Australians, in Astronomy & cosmology in folk traditions and cultural heritage, ed. Jonas Vaiskunas, Archaeologia Baltica, 10, 246–252.
Norris, R. P. (2016). Australian aboriginal astronomy and navigation. Proceedings Astronomical Society of Australia, 33, e039.
Norris, R. P., & Norris, P. M. (2009). Emu dreaming: An introduction to australian aboriginal astronomy. Sydney: Emu Dreaming.
O’Connell, J. F., & Allen, J. (2004). Dating the colonization of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia New Guinea): A review of recent research. Journal of Archaeological Science, 31, 835.
Parker, K. L. (1905). The euahlayi tribe: A study of Aboriginal life in Australia. Boston: Adamant Media Corp.
Planeaux, C. (2006). The Athenian Calendar, Ancient History Encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://www.ancient.eu/article/833/.
Rasmussen, M., et al. (2011). An aboriginal Australian genome reveals separate human dispersals into Asia. Science, 334, 94.
Smyth, R. (1878). Aborigines of victoria (Vol. 2). London: J. Ferres, Govt. Printer.
Sparavigna, A. (2008). The Pleiades: The celestial herd of ancient timekeepers, arXiv:0810.1592.
Stauffer, J. R., Schultz, G., & Kirkpatrick, J. D. (1998). Keck spectra of pleiades brown dwarf candidates and a precise determination of the lithium depletion edge in the pleiades. The Astrophysical Journal, 499, L199.
Taylor, H. R. (1981). Racial variations in vision. American Journal of Epidemiology, 113, 62–80.
Teichelmann, C. G., & Schuermann, C. W. (1840). Outlines of a grammar, vocabulary, and phraseology, of the aboriginal language of South Australia. Adelaide: Teichelmann and Schuermann.
Tindale, N. B. (1983). Celestial lore of some Australian aboriginal tribes. Archaeoastronomy, 12, 358.
Tindale, N. B., & Lindsay, H. A. (1963). Aboriginal Australians. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press.
Ushomirsky, G., Matzner, C. D., Brown, E. F., et al. (1998). Light-element depletion in contracting brown dwarfs and pre-main-sequence stars. Astrophysical Journal, 497, 253–266.
van Leeuwen, F. (2009). Parallaxes and proper motions for 20 open clusters as based on the new Hipparcos catalogue. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 497, 209–242.
Waelkens, C., & Rufener, F. (1985). Photometric variability of mid-B stars. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 152, 6–14.
Wells, A. E. (1973). Stars in the sky. Adelaide: Rigby.
White, T. R., Pope, B. J. S., Antoci, V., et al. (2017). Beyond the Kepler/K2 bright limit: Variability in the seven brightest members of the Pleiades. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 471, 2882–2901.
Yanoff, M., & Duker, J. S. (2009). Ophthalmology (3rd ed.). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Acknowledgments
We acknowledge and pay our respects to the traditional owners and elders, both past and present, of all the Indigenous groups mentioned in this paper. We thank Simon O’Toole and Norbert Langer for helpful advice on the variability of the stars of the Pleiades, and Miroslav Filipovic for information about Serbian astronomy. We thank Harilaos Ginis for a helpful discussion about the acuity of the human eye.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Norris, R.P., Norris, B.R.M. (2021). Why Are There Seven Sisters?. In: Boutsikas, E., McCluskey, S.C., Steele, J. (eds) Advancing Cultural Astronomy. Historical & Cultural Astronomy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64606-6_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64606-6_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-64605-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-64606-6
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)