Found: the world's first calendar
|Published
It's easy to keep track of important dates with apps and electronic devices. It's easy to keep track of important dates with apps and electronic devices.
London - Humans had a sophisticated calendrical system thousands of years earlier than previously thought, according to new research.
The discovery is based on a detailed analysis of data from an archaeological site in northern Scotland - a row of ancient pits which archaeologists now believe is the world's oldest calendar. It is almost 5 000 years older than its nearest rival - an ancient calendar from Bronze Age Mesopotamia.
Archaeologists believe that the complex of pits, created by Stone Age Britons about 10 000 years ago, was designed to represent the months of the year and the lunar phases of the month. They believe it also allowed the observation of the mid-winter sunrise - in effect, the birth of the new year - so that the lunar calendar could be annually re-calibrated to bring it back into line with the solar year.
Remarkably, the monument was in use for about 4 000 years, from around 8 000BC to around 4 000BC. The 12 pits - one for each month - were periodically re-cut over those four millennia. Variations in the depths of the pits suggest that they had a complex design, with each lunar month potentially divided into three roughly ten-day “weeks” representing the waxing moon, the full moon and the waning moon.
The site, at Warren Field, Crathes, Aberdeenshire, was excavated in 2004 by the National Trust for Scotland, but the data was only analysed in detail over the past six months by a team of specialists led by Professor Vincent Gaffney of the University of Birmingham.
“The research demonstrates that Stone Age society 10 000 years ago was much more sophisticated than we had previously suspected,” said Professor Gaffney. - The Independent