I imagine the very first time a human sees a wooly mammoth he might think that is the one and only wooly mammoth in existence. But then he sees a second one and a third and a fourth. It really does not take much looking around to see that in nature there is more than one of virtually everything. Before too long, if a bird flew past you in a certain direction then sometime later a bird flew past you going in the same direction, you’d be likely to conclude it was two different birds.
Are there any recorded instances of humans believing that each day a different ball of fire passed overhead?
It seems that theory of a different sun passing overhead each day would make the most sense at first, because there was no way to know that the ball of fire could somehow sneak around again to its starting point during the dark time.
Do we know when man started to realize that it was one sun that kept returning daily rather than a different sun each time?
Before heliocentrism and geocentrism was there must have been a belief that the earth stood still and different lights flew overhead from east to west, never to return again.
If you saw a wooly mammoth walk across the field in the same direction every day and only once a day and you never saw another wooly mammoth on any day wouldn’t you figure that there was only one wooly mammoth?
The Sun has no constant “pattern” to it, but it does rise and set in about the same place from day to day - so it seems about as easy to believe there’s just one as for an infant to believe he has just one mother and one father.
There’s also the point that the stars have all sorts of “pattern”, which repeats every night with only minor variation. This demonstrates that celestial features can march by repeatedly, and this idea can quite naturally be extended to the sun.
But you don’t need either heliocentrism or geocentrism or even the idea of a spherical earth to come up with the idea that the motion of the sun may continue after it sinks below the horizon, and that this accounts for its rising some hours later above the opposite horizon.
The same ancient people who could see the Sun following the same path every day could also see the Moon doing the same - and the Moon has visible features which make it identifiable. And the constellations stay constant as they follow the same path.
So I think the default belief most people would have would be those things up in the sky were the same things reappearing day after day. It makes more sense than theorizing there are series of identically appearing objects following the same routine.
It’s like if you take the train to work every morning and see an identical-looking conductor day after day. Are you going to assume it’s one person working the same job every day or a series of clones that each work a single day?
Because they are on a much longer cycle, and their individual cycles vary, I think it took us a while to realize that comets did not just pass straight on by.
How early was the Morning Star known to be the same as the Evening Star? I would guess that the Babylonians/Egyptians/Greeks knew…but… When did someone figure out, “Hey, you never see the two at the same time?”
No … that idea would live for at most 24 hours… Because of constellations…
Wouldn’t the majority recognize constellations ? And then its the default assumption that if a constellation appears each night, its the same constellation … the same stars.
The Greek presocratic philosopher Parmenides (early 5th century B.C.) was credited with this discovery in ancient times. (The suggestion that it may instead have been Pythagoras is almost certainly wrong.) However, the Babylonians had been investing enormous effort in observational astronomy and record keeping for many centuries before Parmenides’ time, so I think it is unlikely that they hadn’t caught on to the fact.
Isn’t it Australian aborigines who have a myth about the Sun being eaten each evening by a giant snake (or something like that), and re-created each morning? I would not be surprised if there are not other similar myths from other parts of the world.
One of the first responses to the Sun was to recognize that it was important and fairly essential to life, so early religion fairly quickly associated it with a god, singular, which suggests that they thought there was only one, that came and went regularly.
I wonder if the first people thought the Moon was more important than the Sun, because the moon gave us light at night, while the sun shone only in the daytime.
This would make some sense. People would understand the concept of life and death. But there’s no reason to assume that today’s sun goes off somewhere else and a new one takes the same journey across the sky the next day. Someone may have thought that, but other concepts based on life experiences would be more believeable.