As we process the event of the Great Conjunction (say, couldn't an observer on Saturn have noticed something too, the tiniest blue blip in the vicinity of Jupiter and its moons?) I'm delighted by a story which crossed my FaceBook path. Folklorists have long noticed that the story of the Seven Sisters, the constellation known to us as the Pleiades, is so widespread among the world's peoples that it might be among the oldest stories out there. Most folks in fact only see six stars but the stories obligingly explain that one of the seven sisters is hidden or otherwise absent. But why did they think there were seven in the first place?
Some settler Australian astronomers recently wondered: if the story is indeed so ancient as to predate human migrations from Africa, maybe the constellation looked like seven stars to our earliest ancestors. (There are in fact more than seven in the cluster, ten of them in principle visible to the human eye.) Dial backward, the way folks have done with Jupiter and Saturn in our sky, and it seems that 100,000 years ago a seventh star, now so close to another as to be indiscernible, probably was far enough removed to be visible! How cool would that be: a story so old it tells of an older one still.
