Testing stories of ancient humans, scientifically (Score 1)

And that's how the world works today: Rather than astrophysical observations acting as a test for our gravity-centric theories, the observations are just made to fit with mathematical contortions. And rather than the stories of ancient humans acting as a test for our astrophysical theories, they are just abandoned and ignored -- as if the information is just unrecoverable. It's not that it's not recoverable; it's that you just don't know anything about it.

OK, thinking about this a bit more ...

From about 4000 years ago (between ~5000 and 3000 anyway) on, there are surviving written records, relatively large in number and reasonably well understood/translated, from at least two well-separated regions.

Astronomers, among others, have gone over these records very carefully, and have found various events such as eclipses (esp solar), supernovae, and comets.

Analysis - mathematical, by necessity - of these records leads to various conclusions, of considerable robustness; among them:

* the relative sizes (in the sky) of the Sun and Moon have not changed, over this period

* the motions of the Sun and Moon, through the sky, are completely consistent with Ptolemaic models of (what we today call) the solar system, Kepler's models, and today's ones (which incorporate General Relativity)

* ditto, but to a lesser degree of accuracy, the naked eye planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn)

* ditto, also to a somewhat lesser degree of accuracy, and only relative to rather more modern estimates of orbits, a number of comets, esp Halley's.

So, at least in the sense that written records can be read, and information about the dates and times and appearances of some solar system phenomena (as we call them today) compiled, "the stories of ancient humans" very much "act[ed] as a test for our astrophysical theories"!

Of course, various groups of humans, who left no written records, and without contact with others, no doubt have (had) many stories (myths, etc). The fact that "first contact" with some of these groups occurred well after ~500 BCE (say) should provide a very good test of the quality of the astronomical events and phenomena in their stories. For example, do they record the solar eclipses, supernovae, and comets which are found in Chinese records (say)?