What's the oldest story ever told?

5:19Manvir Singh:Okay.

5:20Ray Norris:But all across the world, all kinds of people have stories of the Pleiades as a group of seven, with one of them going missing. So there's this Islamic story where the seventh star falls to Earth and becomes the Great Mosque. There is an Iroquois story where one of the stars is singing as it ascends to the sky, so it becomes fainter. And then there's this aboriginal Australian story where the constellation that they identify with Orion, it pursues the seven sisters, they pray to be saved, and so they're lifted into the sky. But one of the sisters is apparently not as beautiful as the others.

5:59Manvir Singh:Get out of here.

6:00Ray Norris:So she hides behind the rest.

6:02Manvir Singh:This constellation can be seen from everywhere on Earth.

6:04Ray Norris:Yeah.

6:05Manvir Singh:And all of these stories contain a missing star.

6:09Ray Norris:It feels specific, right?

6:10Manvir Singh:Right.

6:11Ray Norris:It's weird. So this is what I want to tell you about an astrophysicist named Ray Norris.

6:16Manvir Singh:So did he find the seventh star?

6:20Ray Norris:Sort of. And it's because he kind of got obsessed.

6:25Manvir Singh:I was fascinated by the big questions. And people were saying things like the Aboriginal people are the world's first astronomers. And we can see from their songs and stories that the Aboriginal people had enormous intellectual insights into how the sky worked. The thing that fascinates me is that the Aboriginal people came to Australia about 65 ,000 years ago. And between them and the British invasion about 250 years ago, there was almost no contact between Aboriginal people and the rest of the world. So how come they've got the same story as the Greeks?

7:04Ray Norris:If you've got a similar story, you'd probably think that one group of people told it to the other group of people. Right. But the Aboriginal Australians have been pretty isolated for anywhere from 50 ,000 to 65 ,000 years. Like, well before the Greeks became Greeks. The only reasonable way I have of explaining it

7:26Manvir Singh:is that when the Aboriginal people came here 65 ,000 years ago, they brought this story with them. Damn.

7:33Ray Norris:And Ray is actually wondering whether this goes even further back.

7:36Manvir Singh:Further back than Australia.

7:38Ray Norris:Yeah, like you know how all humans came from Africa?

7:41Manvir Singh:Yeah.

7:41Ray Norris:Ray is basically wondering whether this story goes all the way back to that point, back when all of our ancestors were in Africa, like 100 ,000 years ago.

7:54Manvir Singh:All right. Why does he think that? Okay.

7:58Ray Norris:I had the same reaction.

8:00Manvir Singh:Okay.

8:01Ray Norris:Okay. Because Ray understands the criticism.

8:04Manvir Singh:The criticism of it is that we don't know any stories that old. We don't know whether humans can actually pass a story on for that age. It's really old. It's like extremely old. It really is. A hundred thousand is really old. And people argue about whether stories can be more than a few hundred years old. Hmm. That just sounds like an impossible amount of time to try and track something as ephemeral as a story or a legend.

8:31Ray Norris:But Ray didn't just pull this date, you know, 100 ,000 years ago out of a hat. So if you look at the Pleiades, right, you only see six stars.

8:38Manvir Singh:Right.

8:38Ray Norris:But if you use a telescope, you can see thousands of stars in the Pleiades. Oh, okay.

8:42Manvir Singh:Yeah, that makes sense.

8:43Ray Norris:Yeah. So here is a picture from the Hubble. So most of those stars are not bright enough to see with the naked eye. But there is one pretty bright star that is at a range we should be able to see. It's just kind of hiding right next to another one. So check out this picture. I drew some red circles for you.

9:07Manvir Singh:One, two, three, four, five, six, with two in those red circles.

9:12Ray Norris:Exactly. So there's two stars right next to each other.

9:15Manvir Singh:That's the ugly sister right there.

9:17Ray Norris:Oh, I didn't say it. But with the naked eye, those two just look like one big star.

9:24Manvir Singh:Right.

9:25Ray Norris:But Ray says that 100 ,000 years ago, those stars might not have been that close together.

9:31Manvir Singh:So at the moment, humans can only see one star there. We can't see there are two stars that are too close together. You're basically dazzled by the brighter one. But 100 ,000 years ago, they were far enough apart that you could actually see two stars. Most people with normal eyesight would see that there were two stars there.

9:49Ray Norris:So here's what that means. Everything is moving in space, right? We kind of maybe forget this. We look out and the stars are basically in the same place, right? But over thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, stuff moves around. And Ray used satellite data to show that 100 ,000 years ago, those two stars, you know, right next to each other, they actually would have been far enough apart that they would have been visible as two separate stars. with the naked eye.

10:16Manvir Singh:Wow. I mean, I think something that occurs to me, though, is that, like, the story is seven becoming six. So it would have to be unfolding on a timescale where people would notice a celestial change from seven to six.

10:30Ray Norris:Okay, so here, this is Ray's idea, okay? His idea is that maybe 100 ,000 years ago, people had this story of there being seven sisters.

10:38Manvir Singh:Right.

10:38Ray Norris:That story gets passed down over time. Thousands of years later, people are talking about these seven sisters in the Pleiades. But eventually, you know, some little kid looks up and says like,

10:50Manvir Singh:Mom, there's only six stars.

10:53Ray Norris:Like, what's up with the seven? And then his idea is that a bunch of people independently come up with an explanation for why there's only six when we all have this memory of there being seven.

11:05Manvir Singh:It's a beautiful story about a story, but it also seems nearly impossible to prove.

11:12Ray Norris:Yeah, I share the thought that this is beautiful.

11:16Manvir Singh:Yeah.

11:16Ray Norris:I think it is just an incredible idea. And I just, like, want this to be true. Like, I have two parts of me. I'm like, I feel both deeply skeptical of this and then I also just, like, want it to be true.

11:29Manvir Singh:Yeah. I mean, I feel like other than the biology, the DNA in our cells, like, what stretches back that far?

11:40Ray Norris:I don't know. It would be incredible if some of the stuff that we're doing today really dates back 100 ,000 years.

11:48Manvir Singh:So that's the most amazing thing. It really ties together all of humanity. Everybody comes from the same roots, and it looks like we've all got the same story.

11:57Ray Norris:Now, here's where I start getting skeptical. Okay. So I called up this guy, Manvir Singh. He's a cognitive anthropologist at UC Davis. He studies comparative mythology.

12:09Manvir Singh:So literally what we're doing here.

12:11Ray Norris:Literally what we're doing, like how stories are similar, where they come from, how old they are, what they say about us. Like literally my favorite alternative possible career. And I asked him what he thought about this Pleiades as the oldest story idea. So it's a really interesting theory. It's in many ways a very exciting theory. I would say that I remain pretty skeptical. And I'll give you a couple reasons. The first reason Manvir gave me to be skeptical here is that if you look at all the other groups in Europe, none of them have even the most basic form of this story, that the Pleiades are women and Orion is male.

12:48Ray Norris:Like, the Greeks are the only one in Europe that have that. And then if you go further out, so all the languages related to Greek, the people who we think have common ancestors with the Greeks, so everything from English to Italian to Sanskrit, the only other time this shows up in this specific way is in the Bengali tradition in India. So two times in this entire group of languages. Right. And so that would mean that every other close linguistic or cultural relative of the Greeks had somehow lost them in recent history. If this story really went that far back, you'd be saying that every single culture in this group forgot the story except for two.

13:30Ray Norris:Or on the other hand, your option is to just say two groups invented a similar story simultaneously.

13:38Manvir Singh:Yeah, it's a really compelling case if you're, like, handpicking all the stories and, like, mythical traditions that back this up.

13:49Ray Norris:Yes.

13:50Manvir Singh:But that's, you know, like, what's the denominator there? Like, how many mythical traditions have, like, come and gone that we don't even have any idea about in the intervening time?

14:02Ray Norris:Manvir makes that exact point. I think sometimes it's hard to appreciate how many human ethno-linguistic groups or cultures there have been in existence. Thousands, thousands. And so even very striking similarities are possible when you have a denominator that is so incredibly large.

14:22Manvir Singh:Yeah. We're talking about going back to, like, the beginnings of humanity. Exactly. It's not about the oldest story ever told. It's about every story ever told.

14:31Ray Norris:Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm not so sure a bunch of different societies coming up with a story like this independently is impossible. Like, just look at Orion. So, here's a picture of Orion. I drew some nice lines.

14:46Manvir Singh:Aww.

14:46Ray Norris:Yeah, Orion's got a little face.

14:48Manvir Singh:Yeah.

14:48Ray Norris:Yeah, I just, I had to.

14:50Manvir Singh:Love hunting women. Yeah, it's the best. So fun. Oh, no.

14:56Ray Norris:Sorry, Edge of Griggs. But look, Orion is in the sky, visually pointing at the Pleiades. Like if you trace the line on his belt, it literally points at the Pleiades. Right. It does not surprise me if a bunch of societies take the most visible, iconic part of Orion, his belt, say, what is that pointing at? Oh, it's pointing at the Pleiades. There's probably some connection there. And then if you're talking about this seven to six number thing, Ray said that some people actually can see more than six stars, like people with really good eyesight. Some people can see eight. Some people can see even up to 13.

15:32Ray Norris:It's like pretty rare. He says anecdotally from talking to people that nobody can see exactly seven. That's what he's found. But, you know, the story might just use seven as a stand-in for more. If most people can see six and some people can see more, I mean, it's plausible to me that they would go to seven rather than eight or nine or ten. But I don't want to just leave us on skeptical. I want to try to reconstruct old stories.

16:01Manvir Singh:Let's do it.

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19:37Ray Norris:Let's do the oldest reconstruction we can do. That's what I want to do.

19:41Manvir Singh:All right.

19:41Ray Norris:So I asked Munvir, and he told me that the best way anthropologists do this is by looking through related languages.

19:48Manvir Singh:That makes sense. Yeah.

19:49Ray Norris:Yeah, like if two people have a related language, the ancestors of those two languages were probably one people that split off.

19:58Manvir Singh:Right.

19:58Ray Norris:Kind of like how, I don't know, like whales and hippos have a similar common ancestor.

20:03Manvir Singh:Yeah.

20:04Ray Norris:And you know how scientists make those family trees of whales and hippos? All whales and hippos.

20:09Manvir Singh:Just whales and hippos.

20:11Ray Norris:Um, anthropologists do this with languages and myths.

20:14Manvir Singh:Okay.

20:15Ray Norris:So you find, uh, similar tropes and myths, and then you look at related languages and you build these family trees.

20:23Manvir Singh:But we don't have, uh, like a language family tree that goes all the way back to 100 ,000 years ago.

20:29Ray Norris:Not even close. Okay. Like one of the, one of the oldest we have goes back 5 ,000, 6 ,000 years ago. So have you heard of Proto-Indo-European? Yeah. So this is, for those who may not be the nerds like us, this is this really, really, really ancient language that's been reconstructed from all these similar languages. So if you look at English, Greek, Russian, Farsi, Sanskrit, they all have these similar words. So like in Sanskrit, the word for guru actually comes from the same root as English for gravity. Gravitas. Yeah, gravitas, exactly. And based on all of these similarities, researchers have constructed this language, this ancient language, Proto-Indo-European.

21:17Ray Norris:But they haven't just reconstructed the ancient language. They've reconstructed ancient gods.

21:23Manvir Singh:The Greeks had Zeus, or Zeus pater.

21:27Ray Norris:He's sometimes known as Zeus the father. The Romans had Jupiter, Jove pater, Jove the father. That's not that surprising. They're very similar. But then there's this Sanskrit god, Djaus Peter, who's also a sky god, sounds very, very, very similar. And anthropologists think this traces back to one ancient proto-Indo-European sky god. So we can almost reconstruct this god that we had no idea about before. And then we can do the same thing to stories. So I'm going to tell you a story that Manvir thinks is maybe 5 ,000 years old. It goes like this. A brash, muscular storm god who drinks a lot, who usually has a beard, takes a big weapon, and goes off to fight and beat a big snake-serpent-dragon monster.

22:20Manvir Singh:Perfect.

22:21Ray Norris:Usually associated with water. Interesting. And you can see a version of this story in Greece with Zeus and Typhon, the snake monster, which you can see on this ancient vase. You see a version of this with Indra in this old Indian drawing. And you see a version of this in Norse mythology with Thor. This is actually one of my favorites. You can see it. It's this thousand-year-old runestone. Oh, very cool. With very goofy eyes. And it's not just that the story sounds the same or the characters are similar. There's echoes of this story in later texts. The thing is not only that across Indo-European traditions, you have a well-reconstructed thunder god, you have a serpent, but even in actual texts, you have the phrase, he slew the serpent.

23:14Ray Norris:You find that in Vedic texts, you find it in old chants, you find it in hymns, you find it in poetries, you find it in magic. And so all of this suggests that not only was this a story that people talked about, but there was even a poetic phrase that was often, that was a part of maybe some old poetic tradition that has since been inherited.

23:34Ray Norris:So, Munvir thinks that this is actually a thousand years older than writing. And we can reconstruct it from all of these things that we have. We just have to have, like, a lot of it. We have a lot of different strains of evidence here.

23:47Manvir Singh:Yeah, I mean, it's a much more compelling case, I would say. Absolutely.

23:52Ray Norris:And, you know, finding these connections, it can be pretty meaningful. Like, for Munvir, he told me he was raised as a Sikh, like Sikhism. And he grew up with this sort of Sikh versus Hindu idea, as if there was some, you know, big divide. Yeah, and, you know, seeing these old Hindu texts as being part of his Sikh tradition, it, like, deepened his identity. Like, my son's middle name is an Indo-Iranian sacred drink. Like, I see engaging with this history has definitely made me feel like I'm part of a much larger story than maybe, you know, the kind of more culturally cloistered environments that we can sometimes grow up in.

24:40Manvir Singh:It's interesting because I named my son after the sun god in Greek mythology. But I don't think I – I didn't name him that necessarily as like a direct like, oh, Helios was this big powerful guy with a chariot in the sky. But I just love the characteristics of warmth and strength and joy that are associated with myths of the sun. And that is something that I wanted to like give to him as a gift.

25:17Ray Norris:Yeah, it's like an idea that has stood the test of time, right? That's really what we're after here, right? We're after ancient ideas that are so good that they're still around.

25:27Manvir Singh:Yeah.

25:28Ray Norris:I mean, I think about my own tradition. Like, I grew up studying the Bible, the Torah. And when I got older and I started reading more academic stuff, I learned about the Epic of Gilgamesh and how it showed that Noah's Ark probably came from some earlier shared story. and at first I was kind of, I don't know, it felt kind of disconcerting that like the Torah was not this unique special thing that maybe I had been told it was. But over time I started feeling like it just makes it richer. And I think in the end that is what I see this Pleiades story as doing. Like whether it's true or not, I think Ray's idea is really provocative that maybe culture, right, which is something we think of as unique and separate, you know, like I think the most beautiful idea of this story of the Pleiades is that this is all of our culture.

26:27Manvir Singh:What if it's not connected? What if a good story is just a good story without that connection?

26:37Ray Norris:Well, Munvir, despite being very skeptical of this Pleiades as the oldest story theory, he does think that we can still say something about what these people thought. So he says that the fact that there are so many similar stories around the world today, it means that the ones they told back then might be pretty similar in kind, if not in the actual story. They were probably telling stories about tricksters and supernatural beings, heroic conquests, dangerous critters, we can still inhabit to some degree the imagination of the people 100 ,000 years ago. And the project of comparison still gives us some insight by showing us what is common to the human experience.

27:19Ray Norris:Without knowing that there's a single story that goes all the way back 100 ,000 years ago, I do feel connected to those people. Because I feel like I can get some glimpse of what it means to be human on an almost universal level. that we all want to tell these types of stories. We all want to tell surprising and emotional and engaging stories. And it's probably what they were doing 100 ,000 years ago.

27:49Ray Norris:If you want to see this episode on video, head over to Netflix. And if you want to dive deeper on some of the stuff we got into, Ray Norris has a great new book called Big Sky, When the Emu Left the Earth. and Manvir Singh has an excellent one as well called Shamanism, The Timeless Religion. This episode was produced by Valerie Schenkman and me, Noam Hassenfeld. It was edited by Joanna Salataroff. Our video editor is Jacob Reynolds. Our animator is Kareem Correa. Our fact checker is Melissa Hirsch. Our studio engineers are Ibrahim Ochik and Joe Nebris. Meredith Hadenat runs the show. Mixing and sound design by Christian Ayala.

28:27Ray Norris:Music from me. And Bert Pinkerton thanked Flapton for the guitar. and turned to leave. How do I get out of here? Flapped and turned to her and said, just remember to stand clear of the closing doors.

28:43Ray Norris:Special thanks to Luke Bauma, Alex Coles, and thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me and Bird. If you have thoughts about the show, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at unexplainable at vox.com, or if you want to support the show, join Vox, become a member. Just go to Vox.com slash members. And if you signed up because of us, let us know. We'd love to hear it. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you right back here next time.

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