"We are stardust"?

Not as poetic as Joni Mitchell, but British astrophysicist Arthur Stanley Eddington wrote in 1920, "The stars are the crucibles in which the lighter atoms which abound in the nebulae are compounded into more complex elements".

As early as the Egyptians- we have examples even PRIOR to that in Sanskrit hiroglyphics of us "decending" from the stars- as well as refrences to coming "from" the place where stars are born.

In the 1300's the early astronomers speculated this, that our Earth and the planets were NOT the center of the universe but part of a universe that included the sun as a heavenly body similar to all the stars we could see. From that they deduced in old texts that we must be somehow "from" a deity which was represented by the being of the Sun- and hence born of star material- though they didn't quite put it that way. Most of this thought was killed by the Spanish Inquisition though... So it took a few more centuries before astronomers began to really look at the greater systems and see the patterns, and till the 19th century before we could "prove" it with molecular science.

It has been in the human consciousness for well over 5 thousand years though...