Unexplainable - What's the oldest story ever told?

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

An astrophysicist uses the motion of the stars to argue that a single story has been told for 100,000 years. A cognitive anthropologist has questions. Guests: Ray Norris, astrophysicist; Manvir Singh, cognitive anthropologist at the University of California, Davis For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email.Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion. Elevate your savings with the Scotia high-interest savings account. Always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest. Conditions apply. Visit scotiabank.com slash h-I-SA to learn more. Scotia Bank.

You're richer than you think. In 1872, a working-class Londoner named George Smith made one of the most shocking discoveries in history. Smith had been a banknote engraver, and he used to go to the British Museum on his lunch breaks and just stare at all these ancient Babylonian tablets. He did this so much that he eventually taught himself to read them. A curator hired him to translate them.

And one day, he came across a story that sounded pretty familiar. A great flood. A ship come and arrest. on a mountain, and a man sending out a dove to search for dry land. Smith reportedly stripped off his clothes and ran around after yelling, I am the first man to read that after more than 2,000 years of oblivion. Smith had discovered the epic of Gilgamesh, this roughly 4,000-year-old story that had a part in it that was a lot like Noah's Ark,

and it was written down way before the Bible was. which led to a kind of unsettling idea. If Noah's Ark was just one version of a much older story, the Bible, this central text that made up so many people's identity, maybe it wasn't unique. Maybe it had even older roots. And then the question is, how old can you go? What about stories people told before they could even write them down?

All across the world, people have been hunting. and one astrophysicist thinks he might have found it, a story that's 100,000 years old. So today on Unexplainable, what's the oldest story ever told? Meredith Hadnott? Noam Hassenthal. Hello?

Hello, hello. So you edit a lot of my stories. I do. We go back and forth about the right way to tell stories. We talk about stories a lot. We do. So what do you think is the oldest story? Oldest how?

Like something that's old. That people have been telling for a really long time. Yeah. I don't know. Like, you know, stories before writing, the Odyssey, some like oral tradition. Yeah. The Odyssey is definitely an old one. That gets us like almost 3,000 years ago.

Yeah. But I want to tell you a story that might be older than all of them. Okay. And it starts with a picture that I'm going to show you now. I'll see it. Do you know what this is? Oh, yeah. That's all right.

That's Orion. I love Orion. It's in the sky during my birthday. Yeah, it is probably the most famous winter constellation, at least in the northern hemisphere. You can see his belt, the sword, the feet, the hands. You can even kind of faintly see his bow out there. Oh, I never knew there was a bow. Yeah. And so what do you know about the myth of Orion? You know, I actually, I have no idea what the myth of Orion is. Okay, so famous hunter had a bow. pretty arrogant brag that he could hunt any animal on earth.

Classic hubris. Kind of pissed people off, pissed off the gods. Yep. There's also this one particular story where he's pursuing these seven sisters called the Pleiades. Okay. And Zeus transforms them into stars to save them. So this is what the Pleiades would probably look like with the naked eye. So they're called the Seven Sisters, but how many do you see?

One, two, three, four, five, six. Six stars. Right. Seven sisters. Okay. So why would there be a story about... Did we want not make it to the stars from Zeus? Okay.

So the Greeks have a second part of the story. One of the sisters fell in love with a mortal, and she was so ashamed, she went into hiding. So there are only six sisters in the sky, six stars. Okay. But all across the world, all kinds of people have stories of the Pleiades as a group of seven, with one of them going missing. So there's this Islamic story where the seventh star falls to earth and becomes the great mosque. There is an Iroquois story where one of the stars is singing as it ascends to the sky, so it becomes fainter.

And then there's this Aboriginal Australian story where the constellation that they identify with Orion, it pursues the seven sisters, they pray to be saved, and so they're lifted into the sky. But one of the sisters is apparently not as beautiful as the others. Get out of here. So she hides behind the rest. This constellation can be seen from everywhere on Earth. Yeah, yeah. And all of these stories contain a missing star. It feels specific, right?

Right. It's weird. So this is where I want to tell you about an astrophysicist named Ray Norris. So did he, like, find the seventh star? Sort of. And it's because he kind of got obsessed. I was fascinated by the big questions. and people are saying things like

the Aboriginal people of the world's first astronomers and we can see from their songs and stories that the Aboriginal people had enormous intellectual insights into how the sky worked. The thing that fascinates me is that the Aboriginal people came to Australia about 65,000 years ago

and between them and the British invasion about 250 years ago there was almost no context between Aboriginal people and the rest of the world. So how come they've got the same story as the Greeks? If you've got a similar story, you'd probably think that one group of people told it to the other group of people.

But the Aboriginal Australians have been pretty isolated for anywhere from 50 to 65,000 years, like well before the Greeks became Greeks. The only reasonable way I have of explaining it is that when the Aboriginal people came, here 65,000 years ago, they brought this story with them. Damn. And Ray is actually wondering whether this goes even further back.

Further back than Australia. Yeah. Like, you know how all humans came from Africa? Yeah. Ray is basically wondering whether this story goes all the way back to that point, back when all of our ancestors were in Africa, like 100,000 years ago. All right. Why does he think that?

Okay. I had the same reaction. Okay. Because Ray understands the criticism. The criticism of it is that we don't know any stories that's old. We don't know whether humans can actually pass a story on for that ages. It's really off. It's like extremely old. It really is.

100,000 is really old. And people argue about whether stories can be more than a few hundred years old. That just sounds like an impossible amount of time. to try and track something as ephemeral as a story or a legend. But Ray didn't just pull this date, you know, 100,000 years ago out of a hat. So if you look at the Pleiades, right, you only see six stars. Right. But if you use a telescope, you can see thousands of stars in the Pleiades.

Oh, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, so here is a picture from the Hubble. So most of those stars are not bright enough to see with the naked eye. But there is one pretty bright star that is at a range we should be able to see. it's just kind of hiding right next to another one. So check out this picture. I drew some red circles for you. One, two, three, four, five, six with two in those red circles.

Exactly. So there's two stars right next to each other. That's the ugly sister right there. Oh, I didn't say it. But with the naked eye, those two just look like one big star. Right. But Ray says that 100,000 years ago, those stars might not have been that close together. So at the moment, humans can only see one star there.

We can't see there were two stars. They're too close together. You're basically dazzled by the brighter one. But 100,000 years ago, they were far enough apart that you could actually see two stars. Most people with normal eyesight would see that there were two stars there. So here's what that means. Everything is moving in space, right? We kind of maybe forget this.

We look out and the stars are basically in the same place, right? But over thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, stuff moves around. And Ray used satellite data to show that 100,000 years ago, those two stars, you know, right next to each other, they actually would have been far enough apart that they would have been visible as two separate stars with the naked eye. Wow. I mean, I think something that occurs to me, though, is that, like, the story is seven becoming six. so it would have to be unfolding on a time scale where people would notice a celestial change.

Okay, so here, this is Ray's idea. Okay, his idea is that maybe 100,000 years ago, people had this story of their being seven sisters. Right. That story gets passed down over time. Thousands of years later, people are talking about these seven sisters in the Pleiades. But eventually, you know, some little kid looks up and says, like, Mom, there's... Weird a second. There's only six stars.

Like, what's up with the seven? Yeah. And then his idea is that a bunch of people independently come up with an explanation for why there's only six when we all have this memory of there being seven. It's a beautiful, it's a beautiful story about a story, but it also seems nearly impossible to prove. Yeah. I share the thought that this is beautiful. Yeah. I think it is just an incredible idea.

and I just like want this to be true. Like I have two parts of me. I'm like, I feel both deeply skeptical of this and then I also just like want it to be true. Yeah, I mean, I feel like other than the biology, the DNA in ourselves, like what stretches back that far? I don't know. It would be incredible if some of the stuff that we're doing today

really dates back 100,000 years. So that's the most amazing. thing. It really ties together all of humanity. Everybody comes from the same roots, and it looks like we've all got the same story. Now, here's where I start getting skeptical. Okay. So I called up this guy, Manvier Singh. He's a cognitive anthropologist at UC Davis. He studies comparative mythology. So literally what we're doing here. Literally what we're doing, like how stories are similar, where they come from, how old they are, what they say about us. Like literally my favorite alternative possible career.

And I asked him what he thought about this Pleiades as the oldest story idea. So it's a really interesting theory. It's in many ways a very exciting theory. I would say that I remain pretty skeptical, and I'll give you a couple reasons. The first reason Manvir gave me to be skeptical here is that if you look at all the other groups in Europe, none of them have even the most basic form of this story, that the Pleiades are women and Orion is male. The Greeks are the only one in Europe that have that. And then if you go further out, so all the languages related to Greek, the people who we

think have common ancestors with the Greeks, so everything from English to Italian to Sanskrit, the only other time this shows up in this specific way is in the Bengali tradition in India. So two times in this entire group of languages. Right. And so that would mean that every other close linguistic or cultural relative of the Greeks had somehow lost them in recent history. If this story really went that far back, you'd be saying that every single culture in this group forgot the story except for two. Or on the other hand, your option is to just say two groups invented a similar story simultaneously. Yeah, it's a really compelling case if you're like handpicking all the,

stories and, like, mythical traditions that back this up. Yes. But that's, you know, like, what's the denominator there? Like, how many mythical traditions have, like, come and gone that we don't even have any idea about in the intervening time? Manvir makes that exact point. I think sometimes it's hard to appreciate how many human ethno-linguistic groups or cultures there have been in existence, thousands, thousands.

And so even very striking similarities are possible when you have a denominator that is so incredibly large. Yeah. We're talking about going back to like the beginnings of humanity. Exactly. It's not about the oldest story ever told. It's about every story ever told. Yeah. I mean, I'm not so sure a bunch of different societies coming up with a story like this independently is impossible.

Like, just look at Orion. So here's a picture of Orion. I drew some nice lines. Aw. Yeah, Orion's got a little face. Yeah. I just, I had to. Love hunting women.

Yeah, it's the best. So fun. Oh, no. Sorry, Agent Griggs. But look, Orion is in the sky, visually pointing at the Pleiades. Like, if you trace the line on his belt, it literally points at the Pleiades. Right. It does not surprise me if a bunch of us.

societies take the most visible, iconic part of Orion, his belt, say, what is that pointing at? Oh, it's pointing at the Pleiades. There's probably some connection there. And then if you're talking about this seven to six number thing, Ray said that some people actually can see more than six stars, like people with really good eyesight. Some people can see eight. Some people can see even up to 13. It's like pretty rare. He says anecdotally from talking to people that nobody can see exactly seven. That's what he's found. but, you know, the story might just use seven as a stand-in for more. If most people can see six and some people can see more,

I mean, it's plausible to me that they would go to seven rather than eight or nine or ten. But I don't want to just leave us on skeptical. I want to try to reconstruct old stories. Let's do it. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Have you been toying with starting a business? Maybe there's an idea you've had. since college or a passion project that you would really love to turn into your full-time gig.

Whatever it is, Shopify can help you get things off the ground. Shopify is an e-commerce platform. They say they're responsible for millions of sales worldwide, and it's one platform that takes care of everything you need to break out of the brainstorming phase and create your first successful sale. Shopify has a host of templates and AI tools to help you build a great-looking website fast, no coding required. Plus, Shopify says that Shopify checkout helps more customers actually buy,

and returning ones can do it in a single click. If you have any questions, Shopify's built-in AI assistant sidekick is there to help you build, troubleshoot, and keep things moving. If you are ready to hear the sound of your first sale today, then head over to Shopify.com slash unexplainable to start your free trial today. That is right. and start your free trial at Shopify.com slash unexplainable. That is shopify.com slash unexplainable.

Support for the show comes from Quince. You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself wearing on repeat, the sweater that goes with everything, perfect fair pants, the tea that you somehow reach for first. Those are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that is what Quince does best. Quince focuses on high-quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere or organic cotton or merino will. The styles are timeless, versatile, and designed to become the dependable pieces that you reach for day after day.

I have tried quince myself. I like to wear something kind of bold over a simple black shirt, but in order to do that, I really need the simple black shirt to fit a certain way. It can be really hard, though, to find the right simple black shirt. And what I loved about shopping at Quince was that they had such a wide selection of basics with so much variation that I was actually able to find exactly what I wanted relatively quickly. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash unexplainable. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. now available in Canada and the UK too. That is Q-U-I-N-C-E.com

slash unexplainable. Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion. Elevate your savings with the Scotia High Interest Savings account. Always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest. Conditions apply. Visit Scotia Bank.com slash H-I-S-A to learn more. Scotia Bank, you're richer than you think.

Let's do the oldest reconstruction we can do. That's what I want to do. All right. So I asked Munveer, and he told me that the best way anthropologists do this is by looking through related languages. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, like if two people have a related language, the ancestors of those two languages were probably one people that split off. Right.

Kind of like how, I don't know, like whales and hippos have a similar common ancestor. Yeah. And you know how scientists make those family trees of whales and hippos? All whales and hippos? Just whales and hippos. Anthropologists do this with languages and myths. Okay. So you find similar tropes and myths, and then you look at related languages and you build

these family trees. But we don't have like a language family tree that goes all the way back to 100,000 years ago. Not even close. Okay. One of the oldest we have goes back five, six thousand years ago. So have you heard of proto-Indo-European? Yeah. So this is, for those who may not be the nerds like us, this is this really, really, really ancient language that's been reconstructed from all these similar languages.

So if you look at English, Greek, Russian, Farsi, Sanskrit, they all have these similar words. So like in Sanskrit, the word for Google. actually comes from the same root as English for gravity. Gravitus. Yeah, gravitas, exactly. Gravitus, exactly. And based on all of these similarities, researchers have constructed this language,

this ancient language, proto-Indo-European. But they haven't just reconstructed the ancient language. They've reconstructed ancient gods. The Greeks had Zeus, or Zeus Pater, he's sometimes known as Zeus the Father. Right. The Romans had Jupiter, Jove Potter, Jove the Father. That's not that surprising.

They're very similar. But then there's this Sanskrit god, Diao's Peter, who's also a sky god, sounds very, very, very similar. And anthropologists think this traces back to one ancient proto-Indo-European sky god. So we can almost reconstruct this god that we had no idea about before. And then we can do the same thing to stories. So I'm going to tell you a story that Manvir thinks is maybe 5,000 years old. It goes like this. A brash, muscular storm god who drinks a lot, who usually has a beard, takes a big weapon, and goes off to fight and beat a big snake serpent dragon monster.

Perfect. Usually associated with water. Interesting. And you can see a version of this story in. Greece with Zeus and Typhon, the snake monster, which you can see on this ancient vase. You see a version of this with Indra in this old Indian drawing. And you see a version of this in Norse mythology with Thor. This is actually one of my favorites.

You can see it. It's this thousand-year-old runestone. Oh, very cool. With a very goofy eyes. And it's not just that like the story sounds. the same, or the characters are similar. There's echoes of this story in later texts. The thing is not only that across Indo-European traditions, you have a well-reconstructed thunder god, you have a serpent, but even in actual texts, you have the phrase,

he slew the serpent. You find that in Vedic texts, you find it in old chants, you find it in hymns, you find it in poitries, you find it in magic. And so all of this suggests that not only was this a story that people talked about, but there was even a poetic phrase that was often that was a part of maybe some old poetic tradition that has since been inherited. So Monvir thinks that this is actually a thousand years older than writing, and we can reconstruct it from all of these things that we have.

We just have to have like a lot of it. We have a lot of different strains of evidence here. Yeah, I mean, it's a much more compelling case, I would say. Yeah. And, you know, finding these connections, it can be pretty meaningful. Like, for Manvir, he told me he was raised as a sick, like sickism. And he grew up with this sort of sick versus Hindu idea, as if there was some, you know, big divide.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, seeing these old Hindu texts as being part of his sick tradition, it, like, deepened his identity. Like, I, my son's mental name is an Indo-Iranian sacred drink. Like, I see engaging with this history has definitely made me feel like I'm part of a much larger story than maybe, you know, the kind of more culturally cloistered environments that we can sometimes grow up in. It's interesting because I named my son after the sun god in Greek mythology. But I don't think I, I didn't name him that. necessarily as like a direct like, oh, Helius was this big powerful guy with a chariot in this guy.

But I just love the characteristics of warmth and strength and joy that are associated with myths of the sun. And that is something that I wanted to like give to him as a gift. Yeah, it's like an idea that has stood the test of time, right? That's really what we're after here, right? where after ancient ideas that are so good that they're still around. Yeah. I mean, I think about my own tradition. Like, I grew up studying the Bible, the Torah.

And when I got older and I started reading more academic stuff, I learned about the epic of Gilgamesh. And how it showed that Noah's Ark probably came from some earlier shared story. And at first, I was kind of, I don't know, it felt kind of disconcerting that like the Torah was not this unique special thing that maybe I had been told it was. But over time, I started feeling like it just makes it richer. And I think in the end, that is what I see this Pleiades story as doing. Like, whether it's true or not, I think Ray's idea is really provocative. That may be culture, right, which is something we think of as unique and separate, you know,

I think the most beautiful idea of this story, of the Pleiades, is that this is all of our culture. What if it's not connected? What if a good story is just a good story without that connection? Well, Manvier, despite being very skeptical of this Pleiades as the oldest story theory, he does think that we can still say something about what these people thought. So he says that the fact that there are so many similar stories around the world today, it means that the ones they told back then might be pretty similar in kind,

if not in the actual story. They were probably telling stories about tricksters and supernatural beings, hero conquests, dangerous critters. We can still inhabit to some degree the imagination of the people 100,000 years ago, and the project of comparison still gives us some insight by showing us what is common to the human experience. without knowing that there's a single story that goes all the way back 100,000 years ago, I do feel connected to those people

because I feel like I can get some glimpse of what it means to be human on an almost universal level, that we all want to tell these types of stories. We all want to tell surprising and emotional and engaging stories, and it's probably what they were doing 100,000 years ago. If you want to see this episode on video, head over to Netflix. And if you want to dive deeper on some of the stuff we got into, Ray Norris has a great new book called Big Sky

when the Emu left the earth. And Manvir Singh has an excellent one as well called Shamanism, The Timeless Religion. This episode was produced by Valerie Schenkman and me, Noam Hassanfeld, who was edited by Joanna Salataraf. Our video editor is Jacob Reynolds. Our animator is Kareem Karea. Our fact checker is Melissa Hirsch.

Our studio engineers are Ibrahim Ocic and Joe Nebris. Meredith Haddon outruns the show, mixing in sound design by Christian Ayala, music for me, and Bert Pinkerton thanked Flapton for the guitar and turned to leave. How do I get out of here? Flapton turned her and said, Just remember to stand clear of the closing doors. Special thanks to Luke Bauma, Alex Coles, and thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me and Bird.

If you have thoughts about the show, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at Unexplanable at Vox.com, or if you want to support the show, join Vox. Become a member. Just go to Vox.com slash members. And if you signed up because of us, let us know. We'd love to hear it. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you right back here next time.