Red-faced hunter

Crowd Science's end-of-year round-up led me to this 2017 article in The Conversation, which - among other things, recounts this astronomical symbolism from the aboriginal lore of Australia:

A Kokatha oral tradition from the Great Victoria Desert tells of Nyeeruna, a vain hunter who comprises the same stars, in the same orientation, as the Greek Orion.

He is in love with the Yugarilya sisters of the Pleiades, but they are timid and shy away from his advances. Their eldest sister, Kambugudha (the Hyades star cluster), protects her younger sisters.

Nyreeuna creates fire-magic in his right hand (Betelgeuse) to overpower Kambugudha, so he can reach the sisters. She counters this with her own fire magic in her left foot (Aldebaran), which she uses to kick dust into Nyreeuna’s face. This humiliates Nyreeuna and his fire-magic dissipates.

<idle-musing>
I wonder why both the Aborigines and the Greeks a few thousand years later decided that this constellation represented a hunter. No time for further research though.
</idle-musing>

The title of this paper rather gives the game away. 

Yes, Aboriginal Australians Can and Did Discover the Variability of Betelgeuse

<comment>
No prizes for the sequence of tenses, but it is only a preprint – not that that makes much difference...

<editorial-note>
In my experience as a technical writer (what I did didn't undergo  'peer-review' – in name, at least – but it was reviewed by my peers), peer review doesn't improve the writing; quite the reverse – it invites the influence of numerous mutually-exclusive grammatical bugbears. It may improve academic rigour, but it doesn't improve readability. 

</editorial-note>

... Come to think of it, hasn't it been peer-reviewed yet? 
</comment>

Recently, a widely publicized claim has been made that the Aboriginal Australians discovered the variability of the red star Betelgeuse in the modern Orion, plus the variability of two other prominent red stars: Aldebaran and Antares. This result has excited the usual healthy skepticism, with questions about whether any untrained peoples can discover the variability and whether such a discovery is likely to be placed into lore and transmitted for long periods of time. Here, I am offering an independent evaluation, based on broad experience with naked-eye sky viewing and astro-history. I find that it is easy for inexperienced observers to detect the variability of Betelgeuse over its range in brightness from V = 0.0 to V = 1.3, for example in noticing from season-to-season that the star varies from significantly brighter than Procyon to being greatly fainter than Procyon. Further, indigenous peoples in the Southern Hemisphere inevitably kept watch on the prominent red star, so it is inevitable that the variability of Betelgeuse was discovered many times over during the last 65 millennia. The processes of placing this discovery into a cultural context (in this case, put into morality stories) and the faithful transmission for many millennia is confidently known for the Aboriginal Australians in particular. So this shows that the whole claim for a changing Betelgeuse in the Aboriginal Australian lore is both plausible and likely. Given that the discovery and transmission is easily possible, the real proof is that the Aboriginal lore gives an unambiguous statement that these stars do indeed vary in brightness, as collected by many ethnographers over a century ago from many Aboriginal groups. So I strongly conclude that the Aboriginal Australians could and did discover the variability of Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and Antares.

L'Envoi

Interesting pattern in the waxing and waning (see what he did there?) of interest in Harmless Drudgery, not boding well for January 2024😗:

Signing off for 2023.

b

Update: 2024.02.22.10.00 – Typo /format fixes.