The Oldest Story

I heard a fascinating podcast yesterday by Crecganford called The Oldest story in the world – The Cosmic Hunt (The oldest myth). In it he talks about the prevalence of the Story of the Hunt as shown in the stars of what our culture now calls the Little Dipper. In stories from the European, Africa, and the American continents two stars are the hunters and another star is the being that is hunted. That is not what’s amazing though; what’s amazing is that there’s a tiny star next to one of the hunters that can barely be seen by someone with very good eyesight, and this tiny star is – in all four continents, the cooking pot of one of the hunters

So this is pretty good evidence for the fact that this story is so old that it predates all the mass migrations that have led the many cultures of this planet to where we find them today. The one outlier is the continent of Australia, for while the Australian Aborigines have an animal connected with these stars, the story is far from the same story, indicating that the indigenous Australians split off from the main batch of humanity before this story became common.

But wait, there’s more! Now that we are able to use computer programs to tell us where all the stars were in the sky in ages past, it turns out that if you roll the night sky back about 30,000 years these stars were very close to the horizon, in other words, close to the last light of the sun. This makes other aspects of the story make more sense. Which means that we are able to use the stars as a dating tool!

I don’t know about any of you, but this kind of thing totally blows me away.