An old Jewish legend says that when God decided to destroy the earth with a great flood, he pulled one of the stars out of the Pleiades and threw it at the earth. That's not metaphor for metaphor's sake. That's encoding. The Pleiades show up again and again in flood traditions across cultures, not as decoration but as a celestial marker, a timestamp in the sky. What were they tracking? What did they see?
Carlson points out that these stories imply our ancestors had a far more sophisticated understanding of cosmological phenomena than they've been given credit for. They weren't primitive. They were observers. They were recording events in the language available to them, and that language was myth. The question isn't whether the flood happened. The question is what they were watching in the sky when it did.