We’ve been seriously abusing the notion of “ancients” in this thread, but referencing Ptolemy when I was talking about peoples who referred to the Evening Star and Morning Star is perhaps taking the matter too far.
The OP seemed to be talking about very unsophisticated peoples very long ago. I don’t know exactly what time period that is, but I have to assume it’s a long, long time B.C.
Nope. Anything before 476 AD is ancient.
Okay, I’ll bite. How did 476 AD become the precise dividing line for ancient/non-ancient?
Or have I been whooshed?
Geez, everybody knows about AD 476 (properly, the ‘AD’ goes before the year). Where have you been?
If we are going to be picky, I believe CE (Common Era) is the appropriate academic nomenclature nowadays (and BCE instead of BC for that matter). The deposing of the last emperor in Rome by the barbarian Odoacer is generally considered the dividing line between Ancient and Medieval (476 CE). This makes non-Westerners grumpy, as the Eastern half of the Roman Empire lasted another thousand years.
The Stongehenge people are prehistoric (older than ancient), possibly Stone or Bronze Age peoples. And they could measure the seasons and years (and maybe even predict eclipses) by watching where the sun and moon came above the horizon every day.
As a fun side note, Copernicus’ innovation was actually worse at planet position prediction than the epicycles of Ptolemy. It was not until Kepler threw in his ellipses that the accuracy became better. And then it needed Galileo to champion it, which practically got him burned at the stake (and did get him placed under house arrest).
Oh, come on, by 476, the Western Roman Emperor was a puppet at best, the Empire in the West had gone down the crapper long before then, and the Eastern Roman Emperors still had all of the nobility of the Roman Empire for another thousand years, they still described themselves as Romanoi, Roman, and thought that they were the Roman Empire.
If they had been able to reunify with the West as Justinian had tried to do, most historians today would say that the Roman Empire had never fallen, but simply shrunk. Remember, Justinian did control a large part of Italy.
According to the Pirenne Hypothesis, Late Antiquity did not end until the Islamic invasions of the Persians and the Byzantines in the early seventh century which truly fractured the Eastern and Western economies and redefined geopolitics for the next millennium.
So, regardless of your contention, 476 is not universally held to be the most important date for the end of Antiquity.
Heck, my Classics History course at college, ends when they get to Constantine’s Edict of Milan.
Actually, ancient civilization doesn’t end until somebody moves to the final column on the AST table.
It’s in a few of the dictionaries, if you believe in that sort of restrictive social convention. 