I don’t understand what logic was used to make the constellations. I can’t seem to see constellations or how to identify them.
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We take the constellations today as an oddity or as something fairly insignificant but in ancient times they were far more important.
Without the wide spread advent of clocks and calendars people told time by the stars.
The positions of the constellations changes over the course of the year and is predictable.
The arrival of a constellation over the horizon at dusk signified the time to plant, another the time to harvest, the next one could mean winter or spring was about to arrive.
Assigning arbitrary animals and symbology to Constellations was merely an easy way to identify them and pass on that knowledge. When you don’t keep written records teaching your children to look for the constellation that kinda looks like a bear makes sense.
The oral traditions of those times would reference the star constellations in stories with associated lessons. It’s very possible that nomadic humans used the constellations as the primary time keeping method in pre-history, knowledge that we’ve mostly lost because it hasn’t been relevant to our society for hundreds if not thousands of years.
Today we just have nonsense like Astrology…
In ancient times, when there was no artificial light, the night sky would be so bright and full of stars around the world. It’s easily possible every culture (of the same hemisphere) saw the stars and grouped them differently. For example, the Babylonians, Egyptians, Ancient Hindus, Ancient Islamics and Ancient Hebrews all had their own constellations.
It’s just the ones that are known today are most the longest lasting set of constellations based on their region of influence.
They are based on a modernized version of the Hellenistic constellations, from around the Roman times. Due to the wide influence of the Romans and following civilizations, these are the constellations that became “mainstream” and are attributed as of today.
TLDR there isn’t a distinctive, objective pattern in the sky. It’s more each civilization created stories based around their perception, and the most influential civilization had their constellation system last.
Ever watched clouds and seen things? Well back before the internet and streetlights people had a lot of time to look at stars at night and saw things.
Also before streetlights there were more starts visible to the average people.
Pattern recognition is something that people are very good at … even when working with random data.
There are not that many bright stars in the sky; people with not much else to do but guard their flocks of sheep at night could play connect-the-dots, flesh out the stick figures, and tell stories about the animals or gods or whatever in the sky.
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