So as far back as ~1000BCE, it was pretty clearly the same sun to people. (mmm - shining aureole)
Second question, which brings me to a question of my own.
Why is this thread in GQ? How in the world could there be a factual answer to the second question? Trying to determine
the answer to something as abstract as that from prehistory would seem impossible. Matter-of-fact, I assert we
cannot even know if the question has a factual basis, much less its answer.
Seeing as that did not even occur to anybody until the very late 16th century, post Copernicus, and the self-identity of the Sun was clearly recognized in prehistoric times, when the Earth was still flat, I think you are probably right.
I think if you only ever see one of something, it’s more natural to think of it as being unique.
I’m not saying always correct to think that way, or even that it’s more rational than other hypotheses.
Merely that intuitively, we think of entities as the blah blah, until we see multiple blah blahs or have some other reason to suppose it’s not unique.
I don’t think that this is something that was “figured out”. Rather, each culture has to have some explanation as to what the big bright ball in the sky is, and that feeds their belief about whether it is the same sun. For some the explanation is that it is something like Apollo’s chariot, in which case since Apollo probably only has one chariot, it is the same sun from day to day.
If on the other hand your belief is that it is a great ball of fire that is lit at the beginning of each day and is put out in the sea at night, then you think it’s a different one each time.
Given how nonsensical ancient myths are to modern ears, it’s clear that to our ancient ancestors, narrative quality was far more important that empirical rationality in terms of explaining the universe.
I don’t want to know the actual date if or when a human decided there was just one sun that we saw over and over again. I wanted to know if there is any evidence in history that some early cultures may have believed a different sun zipped past each day. If there were any ancient myths or legends about a parade of individual fiery balls that passed overhead at very regular intervals rather than one fiery ball returning every morning.
There is a factual answer to the question “Do we or do we not have evidence of this idea?”
Is it? I thought the main Aboriginal explanation of the sun is that
Ngoudenout burns a great pile of wood in the sky, it’s exhausted by nightfall, and he goes to a dark forest in the sky to collect more wood, the sun reappearing when he lights off the new pile. That’s arguably not really a different sun.
The Aztecs believed there had been previous suns in previous cycles of creation and destruction, and the sun they saw was the Fifth Sun…but it’s not directly about explaining the daily reappearance of the sun. Likewise in Chinese creation mythology there were 10 different suns but nine were destroyed, so there was explicitly just one after that.
Many cultures had explanations for solar eclipses which involved creatures or other celestial bodies eating the sun, though not necessarily an explicit idea that it was a new and different one after a total eclipse.
In general it seems like the idea of daily destruction and creation of a different ball of fire would be a plausible explanation. Perhaps it’s cultural conditioning that causes it not to occur to many of us as an explanation primitive peoples would come up with (it had never occurred to me). But perhaps the analogies others have offered to other inductive observations are correct, and it’s not natural for humans to assume something which appears by itself in a similar way repeatedly is anything but the same single thing.
Possibly, but it is also very possible, even likely, that different groups of Aborigines have or had very different myths. Australia is a very large place, and communications across the continent (even now in some ways, and certainly for cultures not only with a very low level of technology, but no domesticated beasts of burden) is very difficult.
Take into account that progress is a modern way of thought. Many civilisations (or cultures / (belief) systems / paradigmae) were oriented on cycles. (Not like the Dutch - the other kind.) Any society that depends on agriculture will observe the returning of the seasons, of the seas, of the moon… Solstice and rebirth stuff…
And be fair, the sun never ever does anything radical like take a right turn at 3 o’clock, or reverse direction and rise in the West.
So it might be a foregone conclusion, or well, apparently.
With this recent spate of cold weather, I lit a fire in my fireplace. The fire burnt out overnight and was gone in the morning. The fireplace was cold the next evening. I piled up some more wood and lit off the new pile.
To me and everyone else in my family, it seems like a new fire in the fireplace. But according to you, it’s arguably not really a different fire. :dubious:
It may be an example of the Peekaboo phenomenon (I know psychologists have a better name for this). If you show your face to a baby (or most animals), then hide behind a screen, the baby doesn’t grasp the concept that you are still there, behind the screen. She doesn’t grasp your existence until you reappear. I’m wondering whether cultures follow this same pattern, thinking that the sun’s disappearance after sunset means it doesn’t exist until the next morning. The question of where is the sun at night may be the same as where are you when you’re behind the screen.
Yes, but the peekaboo phenomenon is only observed in infants. Pretty early on they develop to a point where they know you’re still there, even when you’re hidden, which is the point at which playing “peekaboo” becomes fun for the infant.
The OP postulates, in essence, that in pre-modern cultures, or some of them, the peekaboo phenomenon continues throughout adulthood - but only with respect to the sun.
But, on the one hand, the Sun is a much more featureless than a human face, so it is much more plausible that there could be lots of similar things effectively indistinguishable from it. On the other hand, by the time a baby figures out peekaboo, it has seen lots of clearly different human faces (and the human brain is hardwired to be peculiarly good at discriminating faces), and has almost certainly seen several different ones together on many occasions. It thus becomes apparent that there are lots of different faces, that you can tell the difference between them, and you can recognize the same one when it comes back again. The Sun just isn’t like that.
In short, your analogy to peekaboo is a very inapposite one.
Panache45 makes a very good point. When I first studied art history, I came to realize that the development of art skills in modern humans in many ways mimics the entire human history of art–we start out with scribbles, then stick figures and faces, then better two-dimensional drawing, then we figure out perspective, etc. But back in the beginning no human being could get past “stick figure.” It took a very long time to get from cave drawings and the Venus of Willendorf to the Mona Lisa. I imagine our cognitive skills likewise developed gradually. There was a time in our history when adult humans probably thought other humans disappeared when they moved out of view. The sun, too.
The cave paintings of Lascaux, for one, show mastery of proportion, rhythm, using the three dimensional surface of the cave walls to emphasize elements of their two dimensional drawings, and they even took advantage of the flickering nature of torch light to make their drawings appear to move. The artists of Lascaux had a grip on Cubism by showing the same animal from different points of view within the same drawing.
After visiting the caves, Picasso famously said, “we have discovered nothing”.
The stick figures you see in paleolithic cave paintings are sketchy and naive in comparison because the drawings of animals were most likely done during hunting rituals and were intended to draw the spirits of the animals to the hunter. The more realistic they were, the better the hunt would be. Therefore, there was a taboo in portraying human beings with that level of accuracy because you would have unwarranted power over that person.
Damn. I keep forgetting that humans abruptly appeared with all the intelligence and skills that we have today. If only my school hadn’t dwelt so much on evolution and gradual change over millions of years.
Humans, meaning Homo sapiens have always had the intelligence that we have today. We haven’t evolved our way to understanding thermodynamics and building moon rovers, we’ve just accumulated knowledge (and some of that knowledge has included ways to accumulate knowledge faster e.g. the scientific method).
It’s not surprising that in art too there were things we needed to learn.
But I doubt very much that we needed to learn the concept of things persisting unseen.
It would be quite a survival liability if every time we lost line of sight with a predator or prey we assumed it had vanished.
Evidence shows that approximately 50,000 years ago, Homo sapiens began to leave artifacts showing complex, modern behavior - including art. None of that evidence, from 40,000 year old mammoth ivory “venus” figures to 15,000 year old cave paintings to 10,000 year old petroglyphs show the type of idiographic, naive small-muscle coordination learning that children’s art does. It’s that very switch from “no art” to “mature art” that has paleoanthropologists and geneticists convinced something of major import occurred in the biology of humans to make it so.
The emergence of abstract thought and all the elements that hinge upon it - language, culture, art, music, and religion - occured in the blink of an eye when viewed from an evolutionary perspective.
