Yet we’re still trying to work out our place in the cosmos. Science has been wildly successful: today’s five-year-olds know more about the history, composition and nature of the physical universe than early cultures managed to glean in thousands of years. But it has also dissolved much of the meaning that those cultures found in life. Personal experience has been swept from our understanding of reality, replaced by the abstract, mathematical grid of space-time. Earth has been knocked from the centre of existence to the suburbs; life reframed as a random accident; and God dismissed altogether, now everything can be explained by physical laws. Far from having a meaningful role in the cosmic order, we’re just ‘chemical scum’, as physicist Stephen Hawking put it, on the surface of a medium-sized planet orbiting an unremarkable star.
Critics have fought this mechanistic view of humanity for centuries, often rejecting science wholesale in the process. But now even high-profile scientists are voicing concerns that until very recently were taboo. They are suggesting that perhaps physical matter isn’t all that the universe is; all that we are. Perhaps science is only seeing half of the picture. We can explain stars and galaxies, but what about minds? What about consciousness itself? It’s shaping up to be an epic fight that just might transform the entire western worldview.
With the battle lines drawn, I think we need a shift in perspective; an overview. Here, then, is a book about the cosmos, not a scientific guide but a human one. Rather than give an exhaustive account, I’ve chosen twelve moments – stepping stones, if you like – that tell us something about how people through history have seen the sky. In particular, these twelve stories follow the rise of the western material universe and how this model of the cosmos came to dominate our lives. The stories trace a path from humanity’s earliest expressions in cave paintings and stone circles; through the birth of great traditions such as Christianity, democracy and science; to the hunt for alien life and our recent flights into actual – and virtual – space.
It’s a journey that helps to explain who we are today, and can perhaps also guide a future course. It can be hard to see the limits of something when you’re embedded in it. I hope that zooming out to survey the deep history of human beliefs about the cosmos might help us to probe the edges of our own worldview and perhaps look beyond. How did we become passive machines in a pointless universe? How have those beliefs shaped how we live? And where might we go from here?
1
MYTH
There’s a curious pattern of dots that recurs in art around the planet and throughout history. The number varies, but commonly it’s a close-knit group of six circular spots, distinctively arranged in lines of four and two. This motif is seen in far-flung communities, from holes pierced into the gourd rattle of a Navajo tribe to a painting on a Siberian shaman’s drum. It even appears in the logo of the Japanese car manufacturer Subaru.
In all of these cases, the dots represent one of the most characteristic features of the night sky: the star cluster Pleiades. This clutch of six or seven stars (the exact number depends on viewing conditions) appears close to the sun’s annual path through the sky, and features in multiple myths and legends: in Cherokee myth, these stars are lost children; the Vikings saw them as the goddess Freyja’s hens. They are also a distinctive part of the constellation Taurus. The Pleiades sit just above the shoulder of this celestial bull, with its thrusting horns, prominent eye – the red giant Aldebaran – and another star cluster, the Hyades, splashed in a ‘V’ across its face.
The frequent appearance of this six-spot pattern demonstrates the importance of the Pleiades in societies around the world, as well as the shared human desire to capture aspects of the starry sky in art. But there is more to this story – another example of these dots that seems, frankly, impossible. The cave of Lascaux in southwestern France is famous for its wealth of Palaeolithic art: paintings and engravings of animals, thought to be 20,000 years old, from the dawn of humanity. Scholars have argued over their meaning for decades. Meanwhile, barely noticed on the ceiling of its grand entrance hall, are six plain spots that match the Pleiades perfectly. Neatly painted in red ochre, they float above the shoulder of a majestic aurochs bull.
At 5.2 metres long, ‘Bull No. 18’ is the largest and perhaps most recognisable painting in the entire cave. Its striking similarity with the modern Taurus – it even has V-shaped spots on its cheek – has been known for years. Yet it goes unmentioned in guidebooks and is rarely discussed by mainstream archaeologists. Taurus is one of the earliest constellations to be described: it can be traced back through written sources nearly 3,000 years, to Babylonian priest-astronomers who saw the Pleiades as a bristle on the back of a heavenly bull. But could its true origin be a star map invented by the supposedly primitive hunter-gatherers of Lascaux? The idea was not so much rejected as not talked about at all.
In the last few years, however, experts in anthropology, mythology and astronomy have begun to argue for a radical reassessment of our Palaeolithic ancestors’ skills, and the lasting influence of the stories they told. So in this history of humanity’s relationship with the stars, let’s start with the mystery of Bull No. 18. We’ll explore whether the artists of Lascaux could really have painted constellations, and ask why they may have cared so much about the sky. It’s a journey that takes us to the heart of what the universe meant to the very first humans who had the ability to imagine, remember, explain and represent. The cosmos they created still shapes our lives today.
•
On 12 September 1940, seventeen-year-old Marcel Ravidat, an apprentice mechanic, walked with three friends into the hills near his village of Montignac in southwest France. According to village legend, there were caves beneath the hills – during the wave of executions that followed the French Revolution, the Abbé Labrousse, owner of the nearby manor, supposedly hid in one – and Ravidat wondered if they might hold treasure. A few days before, he had started to unblock a promising hole in the ground. Now, armed with a knife and a makeshift lantern, he planned to finish the job.
The boys’ target was a basin-shaped depression in the ground surrounded by pine trees and junipers, and full of brambles. At the bottom was a small opening that led to a narrow, near-vertical shaft. The boys cleared the thorns – and the remains of a donkey – and dug with their hands to widen the hole to about 30 centimetres across. They dropped down stones, and were surprised by how long they rolled and the resonance of the sound. Those brambles had been hiding something big.
Ravidat, the oldest and strongest of the group, dived in head first and wriggled several metres through the earth before landing on a conical pile of clay and stones. He lit his lamp, which he’d made from a grease pump and a coil of string, but almost immediately lost his balance and slipped all the way to the bottom. He found himself in a large hall, about 20 metres long, and called for his friends to follow.
They crossed the limestone cavern in near-darkness, dodging shallow pools of water on the floor, until they reached a narrow corridor with a high, arched ceiling, like a cathedral vault. Only here did Ravidat raise his lamp, and the boys found their treasure. Covering the white walls was an explosion of life; images from the birth of our species, pulled back into view for the first time in 20,000 years.
First, they noticed coloured lines and strange, geometric signs. Then, moving the lamp around, they saw the animals. There were horses everywhere, golden with black manes, as well as black-and-red bulls, ibexes, and a bellowing, antlered stag. Herds climbed the walls and tumbled across the ceiling, some defined and multi-coloured, others ghostly, as if falling through fog. The boys didn’t understand the full significance of what they had found, but they knew it was special, and they celebrated with leaps and cries in the trembling light.
Lascaux cave (named for that nearby manor) now ranks as one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries in history. It is just one of hundreds of caves in southern France and northern Spain decorated between 37,000 and 11,000 years ago by anatomically modern humans who first migrated into Europe from Africa around 45,000 years ago, during the last ice age. It’s a period called the Upper Palaeolithic,