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 glimpse doesn’t directly link the Pleiades to an aurochs bull. But just like the paintings of Lascaux, it overwhelmingly tells of living beings imprinted on the sky.
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For the native Chumash people of southern California, the universe consisted of three disc-like worlds, floating in a great abyss. At the bottom was the Lower World, inhabited by deformed, malevolent beings. The Middle World, where humans lived, was supported by two giant serpents that triggered earthquakes when they moved. Above that, the Upper World was held up by a great eagle, whose wing movements caused the phases of the moon.
This cosmos was ruled by the sun, an old widower who lived in a quartz-crystal house in the Upper World and dined on human flesh. Each day he travelled across the sky, carrying a torch and wearing only a feather band around his head. At night, he gambled against Sky Coyote (probably Polaris, the North Star) to determine the fate of the people below. Not surprisingly, the Chumash watched the sun very carefully. But their knowledge of the Upper World didn’t just come from tracking the sky. They knew about it, as we’ll see, because they had travelled there themselves.
A few centuries ago, the Chumash thrived along the south-central Californian coast, and their journeys give us one more insight into what prehistoric people like the artists of Lascaux may have thought about the heavens. That’s because the Chumash lifestyle appears to have been very similar in complexity to that of Upper Palaeolithic Europe. They had round grass houses, beautifully carved wooden bowls, fine baskets and plank-built sea canoes which they used to catch swordfish weighing up to 270 kilograms. The men wore body paint and feather headdresses, the women had skirts of deer or otter skins, and they used shell beads for money.
There were perhaps 15,000 of them before the Spanish arrived in the eighteenth century. The soldiers who made first contact in 1769 described large towns with roofs piled high with barbecued fish. In the following decades, however, the population crashed, as the Chumash succumbed to the colonisers and their infections: typhoid, pneumonia and diphtheria.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Chumash culture and language had almost disappeared. But some traces survive, thanks to a linguist called John Peabody Harrington, who worked for the Smithsonian Institution. He dedicated his career to tracking down elderly speakers of dying languages across North America, persuading them to share everything they could remember about their heritage.
Eccentric and obsessive, Harrington worked alone. After his death in 1961, Smithsonian curators discovered hundreds of boxes that he had stored in warehouses, garages and even chicken coops throughout the western United States. Mixed with Native American-made flutes and dolls, dead birds and tarantulas, dirty laundry and half-eaten sandwiches, was what came to be known as ‘the Harrington gold mine’: photographs, sketches, notes and recordings detailing the words and beliefs of cultures that had been thought lost – including the Chumash.
A few years later, Travis Hudson, a curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, used thousands of pages of Harrington’s notes to reconstruct the most detailed account of astronomical beliefs for any hunter-gatherer community in the world. In his 1978 book, Crystals in the Sky, Hudson concluded that the Chumash knowledge of the sky was far richer and more sophisticated than western scholars had ever thought possible.
The Chumash elders interviewed by Harrington spoke of an Upper World filled with powerful, supernatural beings. The pole star, Polaris, was Sky Coyote, father of mankind and the being around which the rest of the sky revolved. The stars Castor and Pollux (the Gemini twins) were the sun’s female cousins, while Aldebaran was another coyote, who followed the Pleiades maidens across the sky. Orion’s Belt was ‘Bear’, and the Milky Way was a ghosts’ road.
The movements of these deities were intertwined with life on Earth. The Chumash knew that when the sun rose or set at a certain location on the horizon, or when particular stars appeared in a dawn or twilight sky, certain seasonal changes were about to take place on Earth: seeds would ripen, deer would migrate, the rain would come. The winter solstice, the point in the dead of winter when the sun reaches its furthest point south and days are shortest, was seen as a critical time for the cosmos. If the sun couldn’t be persuaded to return, darkness would fall and life on Earth would be snuffed out. The Chumash made careful observations to predict the solstice, and on the crucial morning conducted rituals, often in caves, planting quartz-tipped sun sticks into the ground to ‘pull’ the sun back onto a northern course.
This knowledge, however, was not for everyone. These celestial secrets were held by an elite group of astronomer-priests called the ’antap who formed what was essentially a secret society led by the sun-priest. They never shared their knowledge with commoners, and wielded great political influence, claiming that they were the only ones who could understand and influence the cosmic system around which Chumash life revolved.
The priests acquired their detailed astronomical knowledge from countless nightly observations, but also with the aid of hallucinogenic plants from the genus Datura (part of the nightshade family) that they used to go on ‘vision quests’. This allowed them to visit the Upper World, where they could contact supernatural guardians such as Coyote, predict and influence the future, and communicate with spirits of the dead.
It’s a practice called shamanism. The term comes from Siberia, where western travellers in the seventeenth century encountered religious leaders called saman among Tungusic peoples, but similar practices and beliefs exist in traditional hunter-gatherer societies all around the world. Shamans enter trance states to visit an alternate reality or spirit world. During such journeys they meet and gain power from spirit guides, and this allows them to fulfil a range of roles such as foreseeing the future, harming enemies, controlling the weather and animals, and healing the sick. Trances are induced in different ways – sometimes by hallucinogenic plants such as Datura or ayahuasca; by meditation, fasting or sensory deprivation; or by rituals such as drumming or dancing.
Western anthropologists initially rejected shamanism as not even worth studying, dismissing
