Celyn
July 15, 2013, 9:40pm
1
Wow.
Archaeologists believe they have discovered the world’s oldest “calendar” in a field in Scotland.
New analysis of a group of 12 pits excavated in Aberdeenshire shows they appear to mimic the phases of the moon to track lunar months over the course of a year.
Until now the first formal time-measuring devices were thought to have been created in Mesopotamia about 5,000 years ago.
But the pit alignment near Crathes Castle predates those discoveries by thousands of years, experts say.
The Mesolithic monument at Warren Field is said to have been created by hunter-gatherer societies nearly 10,000 years ago.
It was excavated between 2004-06 and recently analysed by a team led by the University of Birmingham.
They found the monument also aligns on the Mmidwinter sunrise, which researchers say would provide an annual “astronomic correction” to maintain the link between the passage of time indicated by the moon, the solar year and the seasons…
It’s always sort of fun to realise just how damn clever all those “primitive” people were. I mean, even with little paper diaries and a computer, I still fail to remember birthdays in time.
You’d stop forgetting if you turned it into a religion that involved sacrificial virgins or something.
