Transcript: Humans has been anatomically modern for about 40 or 50,000 years.  If you can imagine what life would have been like 30 or 40,000 years ago for hunter-gatherers somewhere in Europe or Africa or the plains of Asia, you can realize that the sky must have been important to them.  The first use of astronomy was not in the modern, scientific sense.  Astronomy and the stars and the sky were a fundamental part of people's lives. The sky was a map, a clock, a calendar, a source of myth and legend, and more.  If you lived in those times you would have needed to know the motion of the sun to be able to go on a journey, a hunting journey, to be able to return before dark. Nobody ever stayed out before dark in the time before electricity and lights.  If you were living and subsisting off natural vegetation and fruits and berries you would need to be able to keep track of the seasons to know where your food supply was or follow the migrating herds, so you needed to use the sky as a calendar.  If you were navigating on the open ocean, as many tribes in Polynesian areas or tropical areas of the Earth did, you would need to use the sky as a map for navigation.  Cultures over thousands of years have been able to travel thousands of miles in small boats by their knowledge of the sky as a map.  For these reasons and more the sky has been important to cultures throughout the centuries.  In fact, it is unfortunately only in the modern age that people have become detached from the night sky because so many of us live in cities.