The stars of the Big Dipper look nothing like a bear. But ancient cultures all over northern Asia — from Scandanavia to Siberia — did see them as a bear. Even the Greeks saw them that way. More strangely, a number of Native American cultures have traditions of seeing these stars as part of a bear narrative.
It’s hard to confirm, but the image of these very un-bear-like stars as a bear may well have crossed into North America with the migration of humans over the Siberia-Alaska land bridge during the last Ice Age. If so, this story, this metaphor, is one of the oldest acts of imagination we know.
Note, also, that one of the first signs that the genus Homo had begun to have a kind of imaginative life is the appearence of burials deliberately using bear iconography and bones to lay the dead to rest — the so-called “Bear Cult” of Europe.
I first read about it in an article in Sky and Telescope in the 1980s, but a good article is now online at The Discovery Channel, Canada.