PREHISTORIC NIGHT SKY

How did people in prehistoric times relate to the night sky?

Our ancestors in deep prehistoric times had a human connection with the cosmos that is probably deeper, more abiding, and more deeply felt than we have today. People in antiquity saw the connections between things. They saw light from the sun but they didn’t know how it was formed. Nobody was talking about thermonuclear reactions in the core of the sun. But they realized the behavior of the sun had a big-time effect on the earth—on what the animals did, the plants did. The earliest calendars may have kept track of stars that appear in the predawn, or just after sunset. When a group of stars is visible, it means this animal is going to do this, the salmon are going to run, the deer are going to rut. Those are the connections that were in people’s minds. They had an integrated relationship with the cosmos. Now we’re at a greater loss. We’re trying to figure out how Earth fits into a cosmos that appears to have no limit. At the very least, it’s operating on physical laws beyond ordinary human experience; they don’t make intuitive sense and have to be examined mathematically. So maybe now we’re the ones with a far less integrated sense of our relationship to the cosmos.