One of the scenes he studied was Bull No. 18. Over long periods of time, constellations shift in the sky because of a wobble in the axis of Earth’s rotation; individual stars also follow their own trajectories. So to test how well it matches Taurus and the Pleiades, Rappenglück calculated how these stars would have looked around 20,000 years ago and compared this with measurements taken from photographs of the cave wall. He found that when the bull was created, the Pleiades were slightly higher above the bull’s back and that Aldebaran (the bull’s eye) was more clearly framed by the Hyades – an even closer match to the painting than they are today.
He’s convinced that isn’t a coincidence, arguing that our constellation Taurus (which once represented an entire bull but lost its hindquarters over the centuries to make room for a new constellation, Aries the ram) has its origins in a far older star grouping – let’s call it ‘Aurochs’ – inspired by the giant bulls that the people of the Ice Age hunted for food.
Rappenglück supports his ideas with evidence from anthropology. Societies throughout history have used the Pleiades as a calendar, he points out. Stars circle around the north and south celestial poles each night, but our orbit around the sun means they follow an annual cycle too; different stars and constellations ‘rise’ or ‘set’ (first become visible above the horizon at dawn or disappear from view at dusk) at particular times of year. As a distinctive star cluster close to the ecliptic – the sun’s path through the sky – the Pleiades mark the seasons particularly well.
Today, farming communities from Lithuania to Mali to the Andes still mark their agricultural year according to the visibility of the Pleiades. Native American peoples such as the Blackfoot traditionally synchronise their lives with these stars and the life cycle of the bison: when the Pleiades set, it is time to hunt. The Teton Sioux and Cheyenne even name some months after the bison life cycle: November is ‘the moon of the fertilisation of the buffalo cows’, while January is ‘the moon when the coat of the young buffaloes takes on colour’.
Rappenglück suggests that the artists of Lascaux could have developed a star calendar, with the Pleiades similarly marking key moments in the life cycle of the aurochs bull. He calculates that at the time Bull No. 18 was painted, the Pleiades would have appeared just before sunrise in mid-October, reached their highest point in the sky at the start of spring, and disappeared at the end of August. That means the disappearance and then reappearance of the Pleiades would have defined the mating season of the aurochs, which lasted between August and October. From there it was perhaps a natural step to associate the stars around the Pleiades with the image of a bull. It would have dominated the spring sky to the west of the hilltops that surround Lascaux cave; a giant, celestial creature with a twinkling red eye and glittering hairs on its back, ready to toss the Milky Way with its horns.
Rappenglück sees possible astronomical associations in other caves too. Another aurochs, nearly 4,000 years older than Bull No. 18, in the Tête-du-Lion cave in the Ardèche, has a group of seven dots on its body that he thinks might represent the Pleiades. And in El Castillo cave in Santander, Spain, there’s a mysterious group of seven ochre discs dating from 12,000–11,000 BC, arranged in a downwards-pointing curve and close to a striking 5-metre-long frieze of red hand stencils.
After calculating how the sky would have looked at the time, Rappenglück concluded that the dots are a close match for a constellation called the Northern Crown, and suggests that the nearby strip of hands might represent the Milky Way. In 12,000 BC the Northern Crown never set, but – as the Palaeolithic equivalent of Polaris, our pole star – rotated around the northern celestial pole, so would have been important for marking the direction north. Like the Pleiades, the Northern Crown also features prominently in mythology. A Celtic myth describes it as the star goddess Arianrhod’s home, an icy castle set on a magical, rotating island in the northern sky. Might elements of the myth date from the Palaeolithic, when these stars really did trace a circle in the heavens?
Sceptics insist that these ideas can’t ever be proved. There are just too many possible combinations – too many sets of dots in European caves and too many stars in the sky. But others argue that the various features of Bull No 18 in particular would be an extraordinary coincidence if not intentional. And Rappenglück isn’t the only one linking the caves of the Palaeolithic with the stories we tell about the stars.
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It’s a long-standing mystery why similar myths often exist in apparently unrelated cultures in different places. Take the story of the Cosmic Hunt, in which an animal is chased into the sky and transformed into a star constellation. Variants of this tale – featuring different stars, hunters and prey – are found all over the world.
In one Greek version of the myth, Zeus tricks the princess Callisto, companion of goddess Artemis, into giving up her virginity and she gives birth to a son, Arcas. An incensed Artemis turns Callisto into a bear. Arcas grows up to be a hunter and almost kills his mother with a spear, but Zeus intervenes, turning Callisto into the constellation Ursa Major and putting Arcas next to her as Ursa Minor, the Little Bear.
Meanwhile the Iroquois of the northeastern US tell of three hunters who wound a bear in a forest; its blood stains the autumn leaves. The hunters then follow the bear into the sky and together they become Ursa Major. Among the Siberian Chukchi, the constellation Orion is a hunter who chases a reindeer, Cassiopeia, whereas for the neighbouring Finno-Ugric people, the pursued animal is an elk.
French archaeologist and statistician Julien d’Huy probes the origins of such stories using the principles behind phylogenetics, a technique developed to glean evolutionary relationships between species by comparing their DNA sequences. Biologists use computer software to analyse similarities and differences in the DNA and construct family trees showing the most likely relationships between species. D’Huy does a similar thing for myths.
Instead of studying DNA, d’Huy analysed 47 versions of the Cosmic Hunt from around the world, splitting them into 93 individual components, or ‘mythemes’, such as ‘the animal is a herbivore’ or ‘a god transforms the animal into a constellation’. For each myth, he coded the presence (1) or absence (0) of each mytheme to give a string of 0s and 1s, then used phylogenetic software to compare them and construct the most likely family tree. His results, published in 2016, suggest that the myth originated in northern Eurasia. One branch then spread to western Europe and another reached North America when humans migrated across the Bering Strait, which once connected the eastern tip of Russia with Alaska. That means, he says, that the story must date from before about 15,000 years ago, after which that land bridge became submerged.
The original Palaeolithic version of the Cosmic Hunt, concludes d’Huy, most likely involves a lone hunter pursuing an elk. The hunt moves into the sky, but before the animal can be killed, it transforms into what we know as the Big Dipper, or Plough (the tail and flank of Ursa Major). Elk were the dominant mammals in the forests of northern Eurasia during Palaeolithic times, crucial for hunting, and there’s evidence that they were important culturally too. A 2017 study of hundreds of animal-tooth pendants discovered in Estonia, for example, found that elk was the most common mammal represented in the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods (8900–1800 BC), before gradually switching to bears. As the story of the Cosmic Hunt moved around the planet and through history, different peoples would have adapted the tale to fit the animals and constellations most important to them.
Other tales analysed by d’Huy seem to date back even earlier, spreading out of Africa with the first waves of human migration more than 40,000 years ago. He has compiled a core of ‘protomyths’ that he thinks early humans brought with them as they migrated north and east. Not all of these involve stars. There are dragons: giant, horned serpents that guard water sources and can fly, form rainbows, and produce rain and thunderstorms. But they also include the Pleiades, often as a woman or group of women set against Orion as man, and the idea of the Milky Way as a river, or a road travelled by the dead.
In other words, the star myths we tell today are not just stories. They’re cultural memories passed through generations for thousands of years, that sometimes do reach back to the Palaeolithic. D’Huy calls them a ‘glimpse into the mental universe of our ancestors’. That