Date: February 15, 2010
Title: The First Astronomers
Podcaster: Brains Matter
Organization: The Ordinary Guy from Brains Matter podcast
Brains Matter – http://www.brainsmatter.com
Description: The Australian Aboriginal people are recognised as being the first astronomers to still have an practising culture to this day. Let’s take a step back and hear some of their astronomical dreamtime stories, and how they relate to some of the things we know today.
Bio: The Brains Matter podcast has been producing and communicating science stories and interviews since September 2006. The show is based out of Melbourne, Australia, and takes an everyday person’s perspective of science in easy-to-understand language.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by the American Association of Variable Star Observers, the world’s leader in variable star data and information, bringing professional and amateur astronomers together to observe and analyze variable stars, and promoting research and education using variable star data. Visit the AAVSO on the web at www.aavso.org.
Transcript:
The world’s first astronomers
Hello everyone, and welcome to the February 15th episode of 365 Days of Astronomy. I’m the Ordinary Guy, the host of the Brains Matter podcast, coming to you all the way from Melbourne, Australia.
An indigenous population originally settled Australia around 50 thousand years ago. It is considered to be the oldest continuous culture in the world. Haynes in 1992 suggested that Australian Aboriginals were the first astronomers the world had seen.
They had more than just a passing interest in the sky; and didn’t just recognise a few stars or star patterns. They asked questions about the motions of the sun and moon, what causes phenomena like eclipses and comets and if these were somehow connected to the Earth.
Let’s consider calendars. Many cultures around the world base their calendars on astronomical events. Even our calendar with its 365 days and a leap year every 4 years (generally speaking) is based on our rotation around our closest star, the sun.
Australian Aborigines often have six seasons – marked by things such as stars and constellations in the sky. For example, when the Victorian Boorong people see the Mallee-fowl constellation appears in March, they know the Mallee-fowl are about to build their nests, and when this constellation disappears around October, it signals to them that the birds have laid their eggs, so they can then be collected. A lot of their astronomical observations related directly to their daily lives.
We’ve all heard about how many cultures define their calendars by the moon. Of course, we do ours by the sun, as I mentioned a little earlier. How about the aborigines? Well, given the prominence of both objects, they did indeed consider the sun and the moon. In most aboriginal cultures, the moon was considered to be masculine, and the sun feminine.
The Yulngu people tell a story of how Walu, the sun-woman, starts a fire each morning – which results in the dawn. She decorates herself with ochre from the earth, spilling some into the sky, which makes the red sunrise. She picks up a stringy-bark tree, puts it in the fire to light it, and travels from east to west across the sky, which creates the daylight. When she reaches the horizon, she puts out her torch, and travels underground back to her morning camp in the east.
The Moon-man was known as Ngalindi. He was fat and lazy and round – so we see him as the full moon. He was a demanding chap, requiring his wives and sons to feed him all the time. The wives eventually got fed up with his demands, and attacked him with axes, cutting him to pieces. So bit-by-bit, he became thinner – and we see this through the waning moon, until he died of his injuries. He remained dead for three days until he came back as the new moon, growing fat and round again, until his wives got sick of him again, and the cycle continues to this very day!
Interestingly, there is a story from the people from northwestern Arnhem Land that when the moon-man makes love to the sun-woman, she is hidden from view – resulting in a solar eclipse.
While this may sound like just a story, it indicates that the Australian aboriginals knew, long before the Europeans arrived, that solar eclipses were caused by a conjunction between the sun and the moon.
There were stories of the constellations – named differently from the ones known in Europe of course, but there’s a few that are seen commonly – such as the Orion constellation. In the southern hemisphere, Orion appears to be standing on it’s head – and oddly enough, the some of the Australian aboriginals also saw it as a hunter – of sorts anyway. There’s a story from Arnhem Land were three brothers from the kingfish clan went fishing, but weren’t able to catch anything but kingfish. Of course, they weren’t allowed to eat the kingfish as a result.
However, one of the brothers broke the rule and started eating one – the sun saw this happen and got so angry that she blew them up into the sky – where you can see them still. What we know as Orion’s belt now is where the three brothers are – represented by the three stars in the belt.
What we see as the band of stars across the sky as part of the Milky Way is known as the Mighty River by the Yolngu people, and some tribes from the desert call it a Rainbow Serpent.
Currently, these cultures and astronomical stories are flourishing in northern Australia, for example Arnhem Land. The Yulngu people still practice their traditional lifestyle where lore is passed from generation to generation. In other parts of Australia, such as around Sydney, aboriginal culture was decimated with the arrival of Europeans just over 200 years ago thanks to introduced disease, exclusion from resources, and deliberate genocide.
There’s a lot more to understand from these ancient cultures.
If you’d like to hear more stories on astronomy, science, or general knowledge – please drop by www.brainsmatter.com. Thanks for listening.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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