Although creatures that navigate at night show evidence of detecting North-South direction from the night sky, there is no evidence that creatures other than humans ATTEND to stars in the night sky . However, much life behavior is tuned to the moon phases, and to the relative movement of the sun.

• Dung beetles navigate using the milky way.

I posit that if it were not for the total solar eclipse humans might have been delayed many millennia in attending to the night sky, specifically the stars – and thus would have delayed the advance of sci/tech civilization.  The moon’s phases were probably attended to earlier.

I haven’t yet read of an estimation of the probability that the sun and moon would subtend the same arc with such precision during the evolutionary rise of humankind. Theory claims that earlier the moon was closer and is moving away. With the moon closer, solar eclipses would be much more frequent and taken as a regular “weather” phenomenon by creatures living on the earth at that time.  Later, when the moon is further out, there would be no total solar eclipses and no deep darkening.

Carl Sagan and other astronomers cite this as just pure coincidence.  I posit is as a very significant instance of synchronicity: when a correspondence of physical coincidence has special meaning for life. See Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli.

Those with eyes able to focus on stars still may not attend to the stars.  We often don’t attend to phenomena that doesn’t influence us and are not “sudden” to attract our attention. Individual humans probably noticed the stars occasionally, in the clear night sky, but those experiences were never socially relevant.  That is, until they saw the stars in the daytime, during a total solar eclipse.