Norris paper links Pleiades myths to humans leaving Africa

The Pleiades story, in which seven young girls are chased by a man associated with Orion, appears in cultures as far apart as Greek mythology and Australian Aboriginal tradition, and the reason may be that the narrative predates the migration of modern humans out of Africa, according to a paper on arXiv by Ray P. Norris and Barnaby R. M. Norris.

The authors flag a second puzzle alongside the first: most people with good eyesight see only six stars in the cluster, yet cultures the world over call them Seven Sisters. Their argument is that the real motion of the stars across the sky, run backward over tens of thousands of years, can account for both oddities together. 'Both these puzzles may be explained by a combination of the great antiquity of the stories combined with the proper motion of the stars,' they write, suggesting 'these stories may predate the departure of most modern humans out of Africa around 100,000 BC.'

The abstract offers the hypothesis without laying out the per-star motion calculation or an estimate of how many cultures the pattern is meant to cover.