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Comment by mellosouls | Hacker News Reader

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 early societies where such skills were important.

"Ah, but can you find the hiding sister?"

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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...

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).

Agreed. When hiking in mountains, on some nights the sky is so clear, air so still and light pollution so low that I can easily discern eight or nine "sisters" there. Such nights are usually in summer, but less frequently also during other seasons.

Of course, in or near large cities, seeing five or six of the "sisters" is about the best one can hope for.

Of course, until a few centuries ago, there was no light pollution at all, if you stepped away from the campfire.

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.

That seems unlikely, there are important seasonal phenomena in hunter-gatherer life, such as game migrations, and knowing when a part of their range will have specific foods ripen.

Sedentary people developed the ability to keep durable records, and to build megalithic structures to track stellar phenomena, sure; but that's ability, rather than importance.

A third possibility is one of the stars used to be much brighter for whatever reason.

This is an idea that's been tossed around for a while; it has the problem that ancient Greek discussions agree that there were only six stars visible as long as anyone can recall -- even though the myth said there were seven. So if there was a faded star, it faded prior to 500 BC. (Also, no good candidates for a faded star from modern astronomical studies of the Pleiades.)

Ancient drawings would help locate the 7th star.

Rappenglück (1997) suggested that a collection of dots in the Lascaux cave paintings might represent the Pleiades, in part because it's located above the shoulder of an aurochs (i.e., like the Pleiades is located relative to the constellation of Taurus). But there are only six dots.

If true then at least one of the stories should sound in that vein right?

Let's consider your rule itself, though first modifying it to the real occams razor which says the simplest answer is probably the real one. Simple is probably more measurable than glamor anyway! So what's the simpler of the two explanations? A complex variation of the story as we now know independently arose in multiple cultures and then everyone forgot the same detail (find the seventh star it's still there), or we've been carrying this story with us since the beginning of humanity? Honestly the later sounds simpler to me. It's breathtaking but sounds entirely plausible so why not?

I don't agree obviously - the seventh sister is there, and not every story has her missing.

And a common early eye-test seems far simpler and more believable than a common myth that possibly predates by tens of thousands of years the start of contemporary cognitive parity within our species.

Actually the second version seems to make more novel assumptions. We have no (other?) proof of any cultural phenomenon older than maybe 50k years ago even existing, never mind being passed on. To imagine such a specific story surviving for such a huge amount of time while being disconnected from reality seems MUCH more unlikely than having similar stories arise independently about a hard to see but still visible star.

Also, Occam's razor says nothing about which explanation is more likely to be correct. It is simply a sensible rule about which explanation is more useful to go with when you have two that explain the same facts equally well. It's a pretty clear rule in physics when you have actual mathematical models to chose between, it's much too hand-wavy in the soft sciences like anthropology.

Could this be the result of writing being non-existent at that time? It would be hard to have knowledge passed on between generations without writing, society and preservation. If they lived a nomadic life, they probably had stories to warm up with foreigners but they could not pass a lot of information.

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