Most everyone on Earth can pick out a few basic star clusters, constellations, or asterisms, despite their respective language, culture, or even level of education. Orion’s belt is probably the most common of these, with the three bright stars Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka forming a near perfect line in our Northern Hemisphere winter, but visible from latitudes spanning most of our planet. Similarly recognizable at the same time of the year is the Pleiades star cluster. Rising in the East about an hour before Orion, we know the Pleiades as the “Seven Sisters” of Greek mythology, and the tight grouping of six bright blue stars has been an easy waypoint for seafarers, farmers, fisherman, calendar makers and sages for thousands of years.
Let’s back up to that last sentence – “Seven Sisters” and yet only six bright stars? Didn’t the Ancient Greeks discover all sorts of advanced mathematics? Certainly, they knew the difference between 6 and 7.
Turns out, the Greeks weren’t the only ones in this conundrum.
Danish folklore tells of six brothers who rescue a kidnapped princess, and torn between which brother she likes best, God offers for all seven to live forever together in the heavens.
In Ukraine, the legend includes seven maids who so beautifully danced and sang to honor their gods that upon their deaths, they were brought to the stars to continue dancing for eternity.
The Nebra Sky Disc was found by metal detectorists in Germany in 1999, dated to around 1600 BC, and is recognized as the oldest depiction of astronomical phenomena, including a grouping of seven stars believed to represent the Pleiades.
Jumping continents, the Cherokee warn rambunctious children to behave with the story of the Seven Boys, six of whom flew off to heaven, with one being pulled back down to Earth by his mother, becoming the first pine tree.
Stretching even further across vast oceans and time, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia have various regional stories of the Pleiades, including seven sister who first learned to make fire, and separately, seven sisters who fled from the unwanted attention of a man chasing them. This is strikingly similar to the Greek story of Orion the Hunter chasing the daughters of Pleione.
It wasn’t until Galileo first gazed at the cluster though his rudimentary telescope in 1610 that he observed 36 stars in this grouping, and we now count more than 1,000 stars in this stellar nursery.
So how did all of these ancient cultures, separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years, all include seven stars in their stories, while only able to see six with the naked eye?
Computer modeling of this volatile region of space shows that while some stars have moved further apart in the relatively young 100 million years since their cosmic birth, others have been pulled closer together by gravity. Nearly 100,000 years ago, as viewed from prehistoric Earth, the star Pleione would have been discernible as a separate, seventh star from its current position close to Atlas, which we see today as a double star through our binoculars and telescopes. As such, archeoastronomers have posited the theory that the origins of these stories may well predate any object, culture or language we know of, and that the genesis of the seven stars may have traveled across the globe with our earliest ancestors 100 millennia ago.
Adam England is the owner of Manzanita Insurance and Accounting and moonlights as an amateur astronomer, writer, and interplanetary conquest consultant. Follow him @ Facebook.com/BackyardAstronomerAZ and Instagram.com/TheBackyardAstronomerAZ
The Backyard Astronomer 
I’ve known people with exceptional eyesight who can see not only the familiar 6, but upwards of 9 or 11. I’m not one of them.
A story from the Sioux or Cheyenne Indians concerns the Pleiades and Devils Tower (Made famous in Close Encounters of a Third Kind). Several maidens were dancing for the Great spirit when a bear came out of the woods and threatened to attack them. In desperation, the girls got on top of a large rock, and the bear was trying to climb up to get them. They called out to the Great Spirit to save them. The rock started growing, and the bear kept trying to climb it, and sliding down. this made the famed “Scratches” the mountain is named for. But the girls kept going up into the sky where they dance forever now.
Thought I’d share that.
LikeLike
so many cultures that have stories of dancers going up into the sky to dance forever, there must be more to it than we can ever uncover!
LikeLiked by 1 person
So true.
LikeLike