The Pleiades rule the winter skies. No matter your location on Earth, this iconic asterism will be overhead to greet you on cloudless nights this season, just as it has greeted untold thousands of generations before. 

Given its distinctive look and broad visibility, it’s no wonder that the Pleiades have captivated humans deep into prehistory. But just how long have humans taken note of this radiant cluster? How many names has it gone by, and how many stories has it inspired? 

There are no definitive answers to these questions, but some researchers believe that pieces of the puzzle can be accessed with novel interdisciplinary techniques. New efforts to trace stories about the Pleiades across continents and through time have exposed common mythological lineages that could shed light on our ancestors in the Paleolithic era, the period that saw the emergence of modern humans and which ended 10,000 years ago alongside the thawing of the last Ice Age. 

Some researchers have even speculated that a common myth about the Pleiades, which casts the cluster’s most radiant stars as seven sisters, could date back an astonishing 100,000 years, which would make it humanity’s oldest story by far. Other scholars remain skeptical of the odds that stories can survive for thousands of years. 

Regardless, the human preoccupation with the Pleiades may serve as a gauzy portal into the minds of past skywatchers, potentially unlocking a tantalizing glimpse of the forgotten cosmologies that animated prehistoric human life and continue to shape our perceptions in the modern world.

“I suspect we have only just scratched the surface,” said Ray Norris, an astrophysicist at CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility and Western Sydney University, who has speculated that some Pleiades myths predate human migrations out of Africa.

“It’s an amazing idea that maybe we can hear the stories being told by our ancestors 100,000 years ago,” he continued. “Obviously we only get versions that may have been heavily modified over the years, but given enough modern versions, can we work out what the common threads are that would have been in our ancestors’ version? And what does that tell us about them?”

The brilliant stars that make up the Pleiades were born about 100 million years ago, suddenly appearing in the Cretaceous night as dinosaurs roamed the planet below. Within 250 million years, the cluster’s biggest stars will die in spectacular explosions, the smaller ones will disperse, and this “timeless” constellation will vanish from Earth’s sky.

But while the Pleiades are cosmically transient, their lifespan coincides with the emergence of at least one intelligent stargazing species in their general galactic vicinity. Humans have long been transfixed by this constellation, which is located some 444 light years away; depictions of the cluster show up on Bronze Age artifacts, including the Nebra Sky Disk, and some experts have speculated that prehistoric humans memorialized them in rock art on cave walls 15,000 years ago. 

The cluster is also a major locus of star lore, inspiring stories from practically every culture that looks skyward. For Julien d'Huy, an author and comparative mythologist at Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale College de France, the motifs of various stories are like narrative tracers that can yield insights about prehistoric peoples. D’Huy has become a specialist in adapting software and statistical techniques from phylogenetics—the field that organizes evolutionary relationships between species into phylogenetic trees—and applying them to mythological motifs. This approach, called “phylomythology,” can elucidate the transmission of myths over time.

“These are exciting times for comparative mythology,” d’Huy said in an email. “Phylomythology is just one of the new approaches being proposed, and the new statistical tools and access to large databases are confirming what has long been an intuition: a large part of the world's mythology comes from an old Paleolithic background and has survived to the present day.”

D’Huy has co-authored several studies with Yuri Berezkin, a historian and comparative mythologist at the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera) and a professor of anthropology at the European University at Saint Petersburg. Berezkin has spent decades amassing a huge database that charts out the transmission of known mythological motifs across the world. 

“A motif is anything that is similar in two or more traditions” making it “an episode in the story, or the unit that is replicated,” explained Berezkin. “People change stories, but the bricks from which the stories are made remain the same.”

D’Huy and Berezkin pooled their expertise in a 2017 study called “How Did the First Humans Perceive the Starry Night? On the Pleiades.” The study applied phylogenetic software and tree structure to motifs connected with the Pleiades identified by Berezkin in his database, The Analytical Catalogue of World Mythology and Folklore, with the aim of determining “which, if any, of the motifs were likely to have spread in conjunction with the earliest migrations out of Africa and to the Americas”, according to the study. 

The team’s findings suggest that motifs connected with the Pleiades are more frequently passed through oral traditions, like an inheritance from parent to child, than borrowed from close neighbors.

In the study, D’Huy and Berezkin pinpoint some motifs that are “likely to have existed and spread with the earliest migrations out of Africa,” including the characterization of the Pleiades as a group of girls or women and that motif that Orion and the Pleiades are opposite sexes, with Orion typically male.

“The trees obtained from the Orion and Pleiades corpus can be used to reconstruct structures similar to what we know about the first human migrations, and to reconstruct the evolution of the mythological motifs associated with them,” D’Huy said. “This means that it becomes possible, under certain conditions, to associate archaeological remains with explanations that would have existed at the time the remains were produced. It also means that mythology can join with other disciplines, such as archaeology and genetics, to reconstruct the past history of settlements.” 

The 2017 study outlines a diversity of different Pleiades stories, including a common motif in which a group of women, sometimes sisters, are fleeing from the advances of the hunter constellation Orion. 

Ray Norris, the Australia-based astrophysicist mentioned above, has pondered the significance of this particular motif for years. As a scholar and enthusiast on Aboriginal Australian star lore, Norris has encountered various versions of the Seven Sisters myth across diverse Aboriginal communities, including some tales that mention a “lost Pleiad” that is no longer visible. These Aboriginal tales bear an eerie resemblance to similar stories about a group of sisters, with one lost Pleiad, from cultures all around the world and across many historical periods. 

“The reason that I'm so fascinated by this is because there was almost no cultural contact between Europe and the Aboriginal people,” Norris said. “The Aboriginal people came down from Africa, around the Middle East to Indonesia, about 60,000 years ago—we don't know the exact date—and then into Australia. Nobody else came after them until the Dutch came in about 1600, and then the British in 1788.” 

“So when you find these very similar stories, either they're really recent, or else they're extremely old,” he continued. “I think they are very old indeed.”

Indeed, Norris believes that the Seven Sisters story about the Pleiades may date back an astonishing 100,000 years, to the era before early humans migrated out of Africa. He expounded on this hypothesis in a 2021 paper that he co-authored with his son, the University of Sydney astronomer Barnaby Norris. 

As part of their argument, the pair generated maps of the night sky as it would have appeared 100,000 years ago, which revealed that two of the Pleiades’ brightest stars, Atlas and Plieone, had a much higher degree of angular separation during this period, making them appear as two distinct stars. Since then, the stars have moved closer together from our perspective on Earth; today, they look like one bright star. The father-son team suggests that this celestial movement could be the key to the “lost Pleiad” mystery.

“These ‘lost Pleiad’ stories are found in European, African, Asian, Indonesian, Native American and Aboriginal Australian cultures,” the pair wrote, citing examples from Greek, Australian Aboriginal, Onondaga Iroquois, and Islamic mythology. “It is hard to escape the conclusion that once upon a time there really were seven easily visible stars, one of which is no longer visible.”

“When the Australians and Europeans were last together, in 100,000 BC, the Pleiades would have appeared as seven stars,” they concluded. “Given that both cultures refer to them as “Seven Sisters”, and that their stories about them are so similar, the evidence seems to support the hypothesis that the “Seven Sisters” story predates the departure of the Australians and Europeans from Africa in 100,000 BC.”

It’s incredibly tantalizing to imagine that a story could survive across such a long stretch of time, passed down by peoples and cultures that faced challenges and overcame obstacles that are completely alien to us, their descendents in the modern world. But many researchers are skeptical of the conclusions of the Norris team in part because it overlooks the huge number of Pleiades myths that do not fall into the “Seven Sisters” framework. 

“I'm not sure that the [Norris and Norris] explanation is wrong, but it is simplistic and reductionist, because it doesn't take into account the great diversity of stories about the Pleiades in different cultures,” D’Huy said. “The Pleiades are not always young girls or sisters. In different cultures, they are represented by male figures (such as the Navajo hunters or orphans among the Šuar), groups of animals (chicks, fox cubs, parrots, bees) or inanimate objects (pine cones, candlesticks, baskets). Some legends evoke six, seven, eight or even more stars, while in others they are perceived as a pile of indistinct elements or a single entity.”

“This variety shows that the myths of the Pleiades are not limited to a fixed number of stars or a single interpretation,” he continued. “The problem with the [Norris paper] is that it ignores this richness by focusing solely on astronomical aspects. By neglecting to explore the multiple forms and symbolisms of the Pleiades, they miss out on a deeper, interdisciplinary understanding of the myths associated with this star cluster.”

Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, an evolutionary psychologist and anthropologist at the University of Oregon, has also studied the flow of stories about Pleiades (and other constellations) through Indigenous oral traditions. While Scalise Sugiyama thought the two studies raised interesting points, she emphasized the role of the Pleiades as a key phenological indicator of seasonal change in the interpretation of surviving motifs.

“The Pleiades are used to predict seasonal change (in both weather and resource availability) in forager societies across the globe,” she said. Though both the d’Huy/Berezkin and Norris/Norris studies mention this application, Scalise Sugiyama noted that they “do not appear to appreciate its implications with regard to the pervasiveness of Pleiades myths.”

“What makes a story “catching”?” she asked. “Stories about the Pleiades probably caught on because of their utility in coping with a recurrent stressor in hunter-gatherer life: the quest for food. For all we know, there were other, very different stories about the Pleiades, but these were gradually forgotten because the plots and motifs they used were less catching than the ones that remain.”

Taken together, the differing  perspectives on stories about the Pleiades, and their utility and function for prehistoric skywatchers, reveal the central importance of this asterism as a marker of time, a purveyor of subsistence needs, and a cultural throughline across eras and continents.

We can use the human fixation on the Pleiades as a tool to connect with past societies, anchoring some points with real data like ancient DNA or archaeologist finds—though parts of this story are likely to always remain hidden in shadow.

“The stories we share sometimes unite us as much as, if not more than, genes and languages, and link us to our common humanity,” d’Huy concluded.