Any idea why they brand it like this? Who is supposed to take this seriously?
I'm EU-based and here you're not allowed to claim that your organization is a university if it is not recognized by the state as such (roughly speaking).
Ideally this story should be changed to this URL which has further comments by the author attached to it. Also The Conversation is a legitimate Australian academic site.
Eg you learn to run a team of hamburger flippers at the McDonald's University. Many SaaS startups have a tutorials page named $BRAND University. In that context, a bunch of atheistic reli-nuts calling their clubhouse a university isn't that far off.
I've met him and listened to his public lectures at Macquarie University. He has been researching Aboriginal Australian Astronomy for decades and is well published in the arena. He and his wife have traveled all over Oz, gathering stories from the Elders of tribes.
I've heard him talk about the Seven Sisters story from Aboriginal accounts, but one particular story stuck out:
Ray mentioned how one particular elder could individually name 50,000 stars, and he dared any Astrophysicist to mention 5,000.
I'd recommend that the baby not be thrown out with the bath water.
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-blogs/how-many-stars-n...
So yeah it is snake oil now.
So yeah, he probably did not grasp what he was taught, but then again, you'd expect a self-proclaimed university to teach its students better than that.
To me, the Singularity University's target audience seems to be execs who need to convince others they are capable of developing a vision.
I took seminars throughout my career, and a number were dubbed “university” (Like Apple’s famous —and long-defunct— “Developer University” —DU. I still have the certificates they gave me).
Personally, I find it potentially misleading, but seldom actually nefarious. It does dilute the cachet of the word, though.
That be as it may, I fail to see anything deceptive in the linked article. The widespread notion that the Pleiades have 7 stars while only 6 are visible is definitely interesting.
Not sure I buy the explanation though (that Pleione would have been visibly separable from Atlas 100.000 years ago, and that the memory of that time has lived on in myth). But they do put a question mark after the claim.
Singularity University is basically an overpriced executive MBA program, mostly paid for by non Americans excited to visit Silicon Valley. For people with infinite money looking for a taste of Silicon Valley and wanting to invest in cutting edge stuff here, their actual educational materials are totally acceptable.
I used to work with their current law and blockchain lecturer.
You mean the labeling that the EU agrees (if reluctantly) to be legal?
https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/loophole-california-champagne...
Of course a sovereign country can define (or refrain from defining) a university in any way they like, but the historical argument really doesn't help much there. The historical notion of a university is very much tied to ruling powers.
I have a pet (similarly highly speculative) theory that the Nephilim[1] of the Bible might be a earlier oral history of Neanderthals. But I'll just leave it at that, speculation.
Of course many also think the same of Yeti, Bigfoot, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basajaun
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Basque_language
Perhaps, but it's impossible to prove one way or another. More plausibly, they observed that primates possess a type of intelligence of a kind similar to humans, and therefore were readily adaptable to that role in the story.
What we do know is that fantastical characters with human level sentience in the Ramayana exist primarily to engage the audience and to drive forward the epic's central themes of good vs evil. Fantastical creatures are a pattern of this sort of storytelling across the world. Modern storytellers have used the same technique to great effect, like the various species of JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth or George Lucas's Galaxy Far Far Away.
In this way, there is a striking contrast between the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata, despite emerging from the same cultural milieu as the Ramayana, is a complex human sociological drama without clear lines of good and evil. It makes little use of fantastical species, as their presence would detract from the story's fundamentally human themes. The only non human characters of consequence are gods, but even they are far from perfect and instead exhibit the same flaws as the humans.
By no means expert, so happy to be proven wrong.
1. Groups like these were more likely to survive if they were isolated and not occupying territory that the (presumably) more sophisticated Homo Sapiens coveted, so maybe they just didn't get interacted with otherwise. Rama had a Vanavasa (forest-living) and a generally weird out-of-pattern life for the time, so had a slightly higher chance of encountering them.
2. If people in later stories did come in contact with them, they were probably trying to expand their territories or otherwise conquer the land. In that case, the stories are going to mythologize them as savage Asuraas, to give further justification to the conquests.
3. We only have a few stories, of unknown time origin, remaining out of hundreds of thousands of stories told by different groups in different places over the millenia. So even if a significant portion of the stories featured Vaanaraas, it's plausible they might all have been lost before they could reach us.
4. In particular, given that such groups were declining in numbers over time, and the fact that more recent stories are more likely to survive, it makes sense that stories featuring them are more likely to have been forgotten and lost to time.
Even though he is depicted as part of the monkey army, he was really known to be a bear. A bear like giant creature.
He appears again in Mahabharata as the possessor of the Syamantaka Gem that was stolen and was in his possession. They live in a cave and hidden from the rest of the people. He is defeated by Krishna and he accepts defeat. He also offer Krishna his daughter Jambavati’s hand in marriage.
In the Puranas ..after the Ramayana war, all the monkeys and bears who lost their lives were brought back to life and they returned to their abode. Mahabharata is to have happened in a different yuga.
Hanuman keeps appearing in all puranas because he is Chiranjeevi..one without death. And hence more of an archetype than a character in every yuga.
There are more than 6 "sisters" visible with the naked eye, but most people normally can't see them.
It's more believable to me that the "missing" 7th sister is just the brightest of the less visible ones.
Those less visible would certainly have been used as a test of prowess for determining the keenest-eyed, especially among early societies where such skills were important.
"Ah, but can you find the hiding sister?"
There are several stars in the 5-6 magnitude range close to the limits of human vision in the Pleiades. Seven is also often a sacred number. We also have precedent for cultures such as the Greeks and Arabs using double stars to test vision, namely Mizar and Alcor[1,2]. The typical limiting magnitude for unaided vision is about 6 under perfect conditions, but some people with exceptional vision can see to mag 7.
So it seems highly plausible that most people could only see six, but they knew there were about 7 because some sharp-eyed people could see them and would tell them so.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizar_and_Alcor#Test_of_eyesig... [2] https://www.surveyophthalmol.com/article/S0039-6257(08)00119...
Of course, in or near large cities, seeing five or six of the "sisters" is about the best one can hope for.
Ancient drawings would help locate the 7th star. One would think star charts are a natural subject for inscriptions predating written language.
This is an idea that's been tossed around for a while; it has the problem that ancient Greek discussions agree that there were only six stars visible as long as anyone can recall -- even though the myth said there were seven. So if there was a faded star, it faded prior to 500 BC. (Also, no good candidates for a faded star from modern astronomical studies of the Pleiades.)
Ancient drawings would help locate the 7th star.
Rappenglück (1997) suggested that a collection of dots in the Lascaux cave paintings might represent the Pleiades, in part because it's located above the shoulder of an aurochs (i.e., like the Pleiades is located relative to the constellation of Taurus). But there are only six dots.
Let's consider your rule itself, though first modifying it to the real occams razor which says the simplest answer is probably the real one. Simple is probably more measurable than glamor anyway! So what's the simpler of the two explanations? A complex variation of the story as we now know independently arose in multiple cultures and then everyone forgot the same detail (find the seventh star it's still there), or we've been carrying this story with us since the beginning of humanity? Honestly the later sounds simpler to me. It's breathtaking but sounds entirely plausible so why not?
Also, Occam's razor says nothing about which explanation is more likely to be correct. It is simply a sensible rule about which explanation is more useful to go with when you have two that explain the same facts equally well. It's a pretty clear rule in physics when you have actual mathematical models to chose between, it's much too hand-wavy in the soft sciences like anthropology.
And a common early eye-test seems far simpler and more believable than a common myth that possibly predates by tens of thousands of years the start of contemporary cognitive parity within our species.
> It is among the star clusters nearest to Earth... and is the cluster most obvious to the naked eye in the night sky.
Only six stars in the cluster are visible to the naked eye yet mythology from several ancient cultures share the idea that one of the seven “sisters" is hidden. The article The world’s oldest story?, originally published in TheConversation [2], states:
> The star Pleione... was a bit further away from Atlas in 100,000 BC, making it much easier to see.
These two stars now appear as one to the naked eye which the author proposes is the source of the hidden sister. This dates the story to 100 kya.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades
[2] https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-oldest-story-astronom...
[..] Babylonian astronomy collated earlier observations and divinations into sets of Babylonian star catalogues, during and after the Kassite rule over Babylonia. These star catalogues, written in cuneiform script, contained lists of constellations, individual stars, and planets. The constellations were probably collected from various other sources. The earliest catalogue, Three Stars Each, mentions stars of Akkad, of Amurru, of Elam and others. Various sources have theorized a Sumerian origin for these Babylonian constellations, but an Elamite origin has also been proposed.[..]
MUL is ‘three stars each’ and Pleiades was a cluster of stars which is ‘star of stars’. MUL.MUL. While star was depicted as three star(looks like three asterisks), Pleiades was represented as twice that.. two MULs or six stars.
This could be the reason why Pleiades was depicted as six stars even though the cluster has more than 6. Everything came to us from Sumerians tho’
On Sumerian constellations and star names:
http://members.westnet.com.au/gary-david-thompson/page11-4.h...
(I am still reading up on this. Haven’t completed..but pinning the link for ref here if anyone is interested)
It is one of the simpler, more obvious signs to draw. I wouldn't read much into it, although one might argue 6ix was a perfect fit if they could only see six (all most of the time).
> There are two puzzles surrounding the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters. First, why are the mythological stories surrounding them, typically involving seven young girls being chased by a man associated with the constellation Orion, so similar in vastly separated cultures, such as the Australian Aboriginal cultures and Greek mythology? Second, why do most cultures call them “Seven Sisters" even though most people with good eyesight see only six stars?
Most people see six bright stars, like those depicted in the Subaru logo. Yet, you are quite correct to point out that the overlapping stars in question, Atlas and Pleione, are named after the parents of the seven sisters in Greek mythology. Six-vs-Seven or Eight-vs-Nine are valid criticisms and raise the question of when the names of the stars were first used.
The narrative-based approach is imprecise but, like Historical Linguistics [2], it might be useful in identifying origins and connectedness. Regardless, knowing that the bright stars Atlas and Pleione were separated in the past is a useful fact for generating and testing hypotheses.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/np0n4v72bdl37gr/sevensisters.pdf?d...
Quoting from an article on their eyesight:
> As an example of how extraordinary the vision can be, Professor Taylor recounted how astronomers were looking at records from the 1840s into Aboriginal descriptions of constellations of stars.
> "The astronomers just couldn't work out how these constellations worked," he said.
> "They talked to me then they went back with binoculars and suddenly they could pick out all the missing stars that the Aboriginal people could see just with the naked eye."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-08/prince-harry-may-stru...
Sun, moon, mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, mercury.
https://astronomy.com/news/2020/01/why-does-a-week-have-seve...
1. Seven days in a week
2. sailing the seven seas
3. the seven wonders of the world
4. the seven continents
5. seven deadly sins
6. seven sisters
7. the seven canonical examplesThere is a whole spectrum of color, but there are only a handful of colors that most humans distinguish and talk about. It has always seemed odd to me that we elevate Indigo into the spectrum of named colors.
However, Newton was fond of the occult, and numerology, and the number seven. He wrote papers about appearances of the number seven in the Bible.
I think that Newton made Indigo an official color just to bring the number up to 7.
Note that different cultures do not actually agree on 7 colors in the spectrum or which colors they are. For example some languages consider green to be a shade of blue or vice versa, or green to be a shade of yellow. Some only distinguish between hot (red-yellow) and cold (green-blue) colors. There are also some non-spectrum basic colors, for example english considers light-red (pink) and dark-orange (brown) to be basic colors, whereas a dark green is just a shade of green; and this also varies by culture.
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/106582/harry-potte...
https://medium.com/th-ink/how-subarus-became-the-car-for-les...
Nowhere, of course, does it reference Subaru meaning the Pleiades being one of those reasons, because it isn't.
[0]https://web.archive.org/web/20100411083646/http://www.subaru...
So even if we're being very literal, "the one with the two stars at the same time" is an accurate description of both the hidden sister story and the cluster.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
People could potentially have superimposed the number seven on the story, as per the rainbow's seven colours and Newton.
Just like the odds of two people in a group having the same birthday is surprisingly low, so are the odds of different cultures coming up with the same story.
If you add a bit of selection bias, where you ignore all cultures that don't have a seven sisters story and ignore all the other myths that are not similar and you could end up with this unsurprising coincidence.
Or may not.
One important fact: people get accolades and sometimes even direct monetary incentives for finding something that is supposedly "oldest of".
Nobody gets famous or rich by revising "oldest of" dates to a more recent timeline.
They could as easily have been seven geese, seven pebbles, seven lakes, seven boats, seven eyes, seven villages, seven brothers... But they are almost everywhere, instead, seven sisters, across ten thousand miles and fifty millennia.
If the story is not that old, how did they so frequently turn out sisters? Morphic resonance? Without, you are left with nothing but a mystery. Citing a common tradition draws on the least far-fetched explanation, as science demands.
The same applies to stenciled handprints on cave walls from Spain to Sulawesi, and as many millennia.
Convergent evolution is very common in biology, which has many more degrees of freedom. Why not in culture too?
Also, TFA only says that the aboriginal stories seem to predate European contact, but which is more plausible: that we found a story that is ten times older than the oldest previously reconstructed myth or that we were wrong and the aboriginal story is actually influenced directly or transitively by some European culture (or some other culture which had a similar myth)? This depends on the evidence back the “seems to predate European contact” claim.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/02/27/...
Amazing if true. I got the impression, when I studied (a little) anthropology in the 1990s, that myths were related to the present structure of a society more than to its past, and that you couldn't expect reliable transmission of messages over such long time periods.
Edit: here is a cool article about geomythology - https://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/MayorGeomythology.pdf
But what if all that knowledge and experience of writing technology and writing based culture were to vanish? What would you be then? Helpless? Lost? Isolated?
Actually, no. You’d still be capable of advanced communications, education, and data storage, using alternative modalities.
It’s like pre-internet humans. They still went out on dates, met up with friends, gossiped and bought things. They just accomplished all that with different tools to what people use today.
"... debate raged in the nineteenth century over Native American legends that seemed to contain ancestral memories of mastodons hunted until their extinction in the Ice Age 10,000 years ago. The possibility was supported by twentieth-century archaeological discoveries of mammoth kill sites that matched local tribal lore about elephant-like monsters."
Frist candidate for an explanation:
* Stories get passed on and some are surprisingly stable.
Second candidate for an explanation:
* The underpinnings of the architecture of the mind cause the same stories to (re?)surface everywhere.
Let's use occams razor.
(I don't claim this argument disproves the "theory" of archetypes. But we should not jump to conclusions when applying it out of context.).
Apparent magnitudes:
Pleione 4.77 - 5.50
Taygeta 4.30
Maia 3.87
https://www.dropbox.com/s/np0n4v72bdl37gr/sevensisters.pdf?d...
100,000 year old stories would predate behavioural modernity, thought to have emerged 80,000 years ago.
Maybe eyesight was better 80,000 years ago, so the seven were discernable to the naked eye - combined with zero light and air pollution. OTOH maybe we'll find further evidence to push back behavioural modernity.
It's a great way of learning — basically a fairy tale compilation, but the fairy tales are worthy of learning about. Also, the reader learns much about the historical setting.
Would be amazing to write/popularize similar books on other cultures as well. Perhaps the Judge Di series[1] about an 18th century Chinese detective comes close to that.
[0] Staré grécke báje a povesti https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16057997-star-gr-cke-b-j...
[1] Judge Dee https://www.goodreads.com/series/50669-judge-dee-chronologic...
No, the series is from the 18th century. Di Renjie lived in the 7th century.
In Vedic astrology, there are 12 houses and 27 lunar mansions or nakshatras. They are the daughters of Daksha, one of the progenitors of humans. He was also responsible for the procreation of the universe, stars, gods, demons and all things living.
The world is born and destroyed again and again. One day of the creator is one epoch. When he closes his eyes to sleep and rest, a great flood engulfs all the worlds he has created and erases it all.
He dreams up the next world and when he wakes up, he assigns a progenitor to recreate that world. Daksha was one such progenitor.
He gave his 27 daughters in marriage to Chandra, the moon god. Each one of them is a lunar mansion..or part of what we see as a constellation of star in the night sky. The moon visits each one of them every night. That’s why the lunar calender month is 27. There is also a 28th sister who disappeared.
The third daughter is Krittika whose mythology is tied to pleiades. The story goes that Agni, the fire god was the representative of all the gods in heaven. When anyone made a sacrifice, it had to be made to agni who will take it to the heavens and distribute it to all the other gods.
All sacrifices to gods were shared amongst them all and the blessings from the gods will be divided equally amongst those who made the sacrifices. They were consigned to the flames of agni and agni ate up the sacrifices.
Agni was beautiful and resplendent. He was also single and because of his nature coveted everything and ate everything. Every epoch has Seven Sages. They were the ones who represented humans and made sacrifices on their behalf.
The Seven Sages each had a wife. And Agni coveted them all. His flames of desire leapt higher and higher at the sacrifices as he wanted the seven wives for himself. There is also a verse in the vedas that says Agni is the fire with seven tongues. seven flames.
Unbeknownst to Agni, one other daughter of Daksha was infatuated with him. She watched him with unblinking eyes as his flames danced for the seven pious wives of the sages. The desire he could never reach. Just like her...because he didn’t even notice her.
Her name was Swaha. Being a celestial herself, she had the power to shape shift. So one day, she changed her form to resemble the first of the wives. Agni was delighted. They snuck to a celestial magical grove and had a jolly good time. The next day, Swaha took the form of the second wife and went back to their love nest. And again and again. She has taken the form of all six of wives. But try as she might..she couldn’t transform into the seventh one.
Anusuya..the wife was Sage Atri was so chaste that even by sleight of hand and in someone’s imagination, she couldn’t be seen as the illicit lover of a man who wasn’t her husband.
So now the secret was out. Swaha was reprimanded and Agni is now smitten with Swaha. But the lovers are together now. The alter egos Swaha created were left behind in the celestial grove but because they can’t wander in a world where the real wives existed, they were prisoners inside the glorious celestial grove.
Swaha didn’t trust Agni still and insisted that she will be present too at all sacrifices made to agni henceforth so he wasn’t making side eyes at the sages wives. She becomes the gaping mouth of agni who will swallow all the sacrifices. That’s why..even today..all sacrificial fires are fed with incantations that end with ‘swaha’. It is not a sacrifice if Swaha isn’t present.
Meanwhile the six shadow wives live in the grove called Saravana.(sara = thicket of reeds. vana = grove/forest. it was a forest with lakes and a lot of water bodies with thickets of reeds) Shiva and Parvati start visiting it for their love making. Their lovemaking created a spark so bright and hot that it couldn’t be contained in any of the worlds. It was dropped in the cooling waters of Sara Vana. There the krittikas each picked a piece of it and raised them as six babies. When the children were old enough, they merged as one. With six heads and twelve arms to become the warrior god, Muruga aka Kartikeya. The one who came from the krittikas.
The sisters feel that they have nothing else to do and ask that they become stars in the heavens. So muruga flings them into the skies and they become the pleiades cluster. They become one. They are now known as Krittika.
Many snapshot predictions are possible when krittika star is present in astrological chart. The mythology helps me remember them. Without going into details, Elon musk..for example..has a prominent Krittika. And the snapshot techniques archetype fits perfectly. There are many examples.
Tesla, for example..has a moderately similar chart to Elon Musk(and so it was a neat coincidence his star company is called Tesla..they share the same Birth date too altho diff years.)..but it shifts by one nakshatra pada which took his life in an entirely different direction even though they shared ascendents.
I like to think that we are all living in a simulation. And I would very much like astrology to be the code that hacks it. But who knows? I am just reading and learning for now. I don’t know exactly what astrology is but I am certainly not dismissive of it anymore.
Anyways..that’s the Krittika/Pleiades myth in Indian mythology.
for example, i will always look for themes like fostering/IVF/sperm donation/adoption/caesarian etc if there is a prominent or strong krittika ..especially in the first pada of 13 degrees 20' of aries. also in taurus but it would be slightly different as taurus is venus ruled rather than mars ruled aries and hence the significations change entirely.
thats just an example of how mythology and archetype patterning can help like a mnemonic device. however, why it is always accurate is something i haven't been able to crack yet. but that's a different topic.
And Islamic history is 1400 years old.
Edit: My bad - I clicked through to another link on the page accidentally
Besides, every text is being altered at each rewrite (before printing technology) and even no story is told two times exactly the same.
Any decent scholar of ancient texts will tell you that. Indian ancient literature is the canonical case study.
I think you're missing the mark here. Advances in archaeogenetics and newly found well preserved specimens have added an enormous amount of detail and color into the origins of anatomically modern humans, even in the past decade or two. I mean, the stone age itself began 2.6 million years ago, and we found that out through archaeological evidence.
KING LEAR
Because they are not eight?
Yes, indeed: thou wouldst make a good fool.
30 years ago seeing stars was a common occurrence for me, now, due to light pollution ?Seems like a rarity.
I personally find the argument quite weak, but just like a Jules Verne novel, where the science foundation is a bit shaky, at least the argument is good food for thought, food that in this case I find to be quite delicious.
First here's a summary of the argument: the Pleiades are a constellation of stars that are part of various myths in various parts of the world. The authors claim that all these myths talk about seven sisters, but since nowadays only 6 stars are visible, and 100k years ago 7 stars were visible, ergo the myths can trace back to a common origin story.
Second: what are the Pleiades? They are a cluster (a group of gravitationally bound stars) of about 800 stars, about 450 light years away from us. The vast majority of these starts can only be seen with a telescope.
Now let's see what parts of the author's argument are shaky.
1. How many stars are actually visible? According to [2] (which is listed in the preprint's bibliography):
"modern observers [..] can typically discern only six stars in the cluster. But that's simply a consequence of a light-filled night sky. With sharp eyes and a clear, dark sky, it's possible to spot up to 12 stars in the Pleiades group."
2. Which 2 of the stars are currently seen as 1? It's Atlas and Pleione. However, in the Greek myth of 7 sisters, these two stars are actually the father and the mother, they are not part of the 7 sisters per se. What the Greeks called the Pleiades actually had 9 stars, the 7 sisters and the parents. Assuming the parents are seen as a single star, a simple way to reconcile the commonality of the 7 number in different myths is that other people saw these 2 stars as 1 too, but simply did not count the faintest of the remaining 7. That faintest of the remaining 7 is a binary star Asterope that is on the boundary of the constellation (and likely to be below the horizon as seen in Australia for most of the year), so its inclusion in the constellation is kind of arbitrary
3. Why are the 2 stars not visible as distinct? The angular separation between them is about 5 minutes of arc. Humans can resolve up to 1 arcminute. Here's a little experiment: "e". Take a look at that e. There are roughly 2 holes in it separated by one horizontal lines. Look at that "e" from a distance, and see how far you can resolve the 2 holes in it. On my computer the horizontal line appears to be about 0.5 mm thick, and I can resolve the letter at about 1 meter distance. At that distance 1 minute of arc subtends about 0.3 mm in length (2pi = 6.28 meters divided by 36060). There you have it, the experiment that shows you can resolve about 1 minute of arc.
But if the arcdistance between Pleione and Atlas is 5 arcminutes, why can't we resolve them? The preprint explains that: the faint star (Pleione) is next to the brighter star (Atlas) and we can't distinguish it because of Atlas's glare. It then goes on to say that in such conditions, the minimum distance for people to be able to see Pleione is 3 or 4 minutes. It somehow concludes that because Pleione is at 5 minutes distance, most people can't distinguish it.
4. How about the past? Pleione is a variable star, its magnitude (brighness) changes. Wikipedia lists a magnitude range of 4.8 to 5.5 (currently at 5.05). Is it possible that it was much brighter during the Ancient Greek period? Well, of course it is possible. The preprint states as such: "we cannot discount the possibility that one of the faint stars was much brighter in the past." And then they proceed to just discount that possibility.
Instead they go for the hypothesis that 100k years ago the arcdistance between Pleione and Atlas was higher by 3.4 arcminutes. Now, a very solid principle of numerical calculation is to always be skeptical of extrapolations. Interpolations are fine, but when you see an extrapolation, pay extra attention. Here, the authors extrapolate from the astronomical observations made during the last 50 years to 100k years in the past. 3.4 minutes in 100k years correspond to 0.01 arcseconds in 50 years. Do we have this type of precision? Wikipedia [3] claims we can reach an angular resolution of 0.001 arcseconds using telescope arrays, and it's possible we can do even better now (remember the "imaging" of the black hole about 1 year ago?). But did we have this capability 50 years ago? I'm not so sure.
[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/np0n4v72bdl37gr/sevensisters.pdf?d...
[2] https://www.space.com/pleiades.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_resolution#Telescope_a...
TLDR summary of article: Plain observation only shows 6 stars not 7 because the 7th is quite dim and close to one of the other stars. 100k years ago it would have been further away from the others. Therefore the story must have originated 100k years ago.
Bollocks and bullshit.