They could as easily have been seven geese, seven pebbles, seven lakes, seven boats, seven eyes, seven villages, seven brothers... But they are almost everywhere, instead, seven sisters, across ten thousand miles and fifty millennia.
If the story is not that old, how did they so frequently turn out sisters? Morphic resonance? Without, you are left with nothing but a mystery. Citing a common tradition draws on the least far-fetched explanation, as science demands.
The same applies to stenciled handprints on cave walls from Spain to Sulawesi, and as many millennia.
They're anthropomorphising the stars as gods, people, and animals that are familiar to them. Families with seven sisters in a tribe of 150 was probably a relatively common occurrence, far more familiar than animals traveling in groups of seven (none that I can think of that do so globally) or gods in a group of seven who they'd have to have previously imagined or imagine anew upon identifying the constellation.
Convergent evolution is very common in biology, which has many more degrees of freedom. Why not in culture too?
Notions of "convergent evolution" and "degrees of freedom" fatally undermine your argument.
Culture has overwhelmingly more degrees of freedom than biology, which is constrained by needs to survive and also reproduce. Culture can sustain things like Scientology, Anime, and Froot Loops, in some places even simultaneously. Similarly, convergent evolution occurs only where environmental forces, such as a precise ecological niche, drive development into a very narrow range of possibilities with radically limited degrees of freedom.
In the total absence of any such constraints, the only viable explanation for detailed similarity across vast distances and dizzying time spans is common heritage.
Maybe there are other traditions where these stars are geese or brothers or villages or starbucks baristas but the authors are cherry-picking those cultures where they are women? Indeed, I would be surprised if there weren’t, and if there really are no other such stories then I would be surprised that the authors don’t mention that explicitly since that would be give enormous weight to their position.
Also, TFA only says that the aboriginal stories seem to predate European contact, but which is more plausible: that we found a story that is ten times older than the oldest previously reconstructed myth or that we were wrong and the aboriginal story is actually influenced directly or transitively by some European culture (or some other culture which had a similar myth)? This depends on the evidence back the “seems to predate European contact” claim.
They could as easily have been seven geese, seven pebbles, seven lakes, seven boats, seven eyes, seven villages, seven brothers... But they are almost everywhere, instead, seven sisters, across ten thousand miles and fifty millennia.
If the story is not that old, how did they so frequently turn out sisters? Morphic resonance? Without, you are left with nothing but a mystery. Citing a common tradition draws on the least far-fetched explanation, as science demands.
The same applies to stenciled handprints on cave walls from Spain to Sulawesi, and as many millennia.