I’ve always had this fascination with the first people to look up at the stars. What did they think? There are records of sky observations going back some thirty thousand years, but unfortunately none of those folks wrote down their thoughts. They lived in “oral” societies, where information was passed along by the spoken word or possibly even by sign language. So, a huge body of thought is lost to us. Modern folks don’t think the same way they did back then; we live in much more complex societies, use many more complex tools, write things down, and understand far more about the universe than the first humans did.

But, at heart, we’re still human, and we can still be amazed at the sight of sunrise, or a comet in the sky, or the beauty of the stars on a winter’s night. And, amazingly, the stars do connect us to our most distant ancestors because, for the most part, the sky pretty much looks the same to us as it did to them. There are some differences, which you’d expect to see across tens of thousands of years of time. The north pole star hasn’t always been Polaris. Over the centuries, supernovae and novae have brightened dimmed in various parts of the sky. But, by and large, the stars haven’t changed much, the planets still make their trips across the sky, and the Moon goes through its monthly cycle of changes.

What did the ancients do with the sky that we do very little of today? They used it. It was their calendar. And their timekeeper. Day followed night, months are made of weeks, and weeks become years. So, the sky was a tool—a very practical one that had implications for survival. Oh, sure, today we can look at the sky and know that it’s day or night, but how many of us know the star patterns for each season? How many of us chart the lunar months?

Back in “the day” the changing phases of the Moon were a handy way to keep track of time’s passage, and, for women, the monthly cycle of fertility. It may well be that women were humanity’s first time and calendar keepers, simply out of the necessity to know and predict their fertile times.

Beyond the very practical uses of the sky, I still wonder though, what did the first humans think of those shiny things in the sky? Was the view of the universe the birth of our cosmic consciousness? Of our feelings of mysticism (since our earliest ancestors had NO way to explain what they saw)? Interesting things to ponder.