How has Orion shaped our existance...

...and how might it affect other intelligent civilizations without one?

What I mean is, we have Orion, a god-like figure that has shone in the heavens since the dawn of man...I wonder, if man's first grasp of intelligence, came from looking at the stars, and seeing himself up there.

For the longest time we were just animals, eating crapping sleeping and procreating, which now-a-days ironically is not much different from typical american bloke daily lives

But for those of us with still half a brain, we understand the emmense significance between eating and such, and thinking of a tool to make clothes!

I wonder if this has anything to do with Orion? Surely any creature who would start to think, would be inspired by seeing himself in the heavens, and so clearly too!

I wonder if man simply IS another animal, except our minds were awoken when one such animal, looked at himself in the sky, and then thought to himself, what is that?

And bet you, the first signs of language, started by naming say Orion, or some constellation, because it's just as easy to take things and shove and push, but to explain this FORM in the sky that looks like us, we'd have to give it a grunt or such so that everyone in the group can look up and recognize that.

The naming of the Zodiac probably preceeded any other form of organized speech! Simply because zodiacal constellations are so well defined, that it seems to me that man would see the image, and then say to himself in whatever way he could think (not having a language) "That reminds me of a scorpion..." and so he'd call the two things the same thing...Scorpio and scorpion, would be the same words to our first speakers no?

So now moving on to the second half.

Maybe else where in the galaxy, there are intelligent creatures, who haven't "awoken" yet, because they don't have stars to wake their minds?

Because any animal with opposable thumbs can use tools, look at chimps, this doesn't make them smart, or "awakend" they simply do it because it is easier...and chimps, don't have a super well defined constellation in the sky that they can see...Orion looks nothing like a chimp.

So stars probably had the most profound impact on human development, but furthermore, I think it is the types of "constellations" we can create in the sky, that truly brought us up from the level of animal.

Sincerely,
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More important than, say, the Great Bear and Lesser Bear with the Pole Star?

I think you'll find that those are more important.

Culturally speaking, the star groupings that announced the change of the seasons were far more important as was the pole star in the Northern hemisphere.


Not all cultures saw it as a hunter. It was known as "The Saucepot" and "The drum" and "The Turtle" and "The Deer" among others.
ching.apana.org.au...

I think it was first raising up on two legs, this led to tool development since it freed the hands to make things. Then hunting since this allowed for seeing preditors farther away and faster. Then development of abstract thought, then development of language. Anyone take Anthro 101? I think that was the way it happened, stars were for easy navigation on land or at sea. This happened later. That is not to say early man must not have looked up and saw stars and named them and wondered what they were, etc. But serveral things occurred first. But I must agree that orion was probably with us from the begining and named among the first and most important constellations. Early man had more on his primitive mind than the stars. Great post!

Troylawson, Abstract thought didn't come about until writing, some 100,000 years after man first conquered fire...there had to be a motivational force that moved man to a "higher level" of conciousness, before abstract thought came about.

As for "sauce pot" and stuff...that's interesting, only means though to simply broaden the hypothesis to stars in general.

I doubt the north star mesmerized people as much as ALL stars did, their simply being there is enough to make any creature that can truly see them, try and think about them.

An interesting thing is what I do with my cat, I point his head to the moon and stars and he cares less, I've always wondered why, can't he see them? Don't they make his little mind wonder at what they are or why they move?

Sincerely,
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Sincerely,
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It seems you put the cart before the horse. Writing is considered abstract thought, as is symbolic representation(like assigning stars symbolic meaning as oppose arbitrary meaning) and language. We (mankind) didn't assign stars meaning probably until after development of writing but most definately after language development. This would be consistant with current thinking in certain academic disciplines most notably psychology and anthropology. No solid evidence to back any of it however mostly theory and educated guessing extrapolation since there is no written evidence except cave walls in France which lends itself to wide interperatations. I would agree to the idea that language development reasonably took place over thousands of years AFTER the advent of tool development(discovery of fire for you Neandrathals).

We were mapping the stars thousands of years before we started to organize "writing".

And speech came from somewhere, animals can talk to you know, some birds can speak human words even with their tongues clipped, one must wonder why when the bushmen can communicate fine with clicks and whistles, that animals can't communicate equally as well with grunts and such, or hoots as with monkeys...only man organized himself through speech. Why?

And actually simple tools were learned first before fire

Sincerely,
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