My grandmother, born around 1885 (her guess) in Russia didn’t know her date of birth in any of the three relevant calendars (Hebrew, Julian, Gregorian) and just picked a date and called it her birthday. She does know that she was about 13 when they emigrated in 1998. My grandfather was about 1 when his family emigrated in 1886, so he knew his age reasonably closely, but no date.
Even Isaac Asimov didn’t know when his actual birthday was.
We shouldn’t make the common mistake of assuming that people in prehistoric times were stupid. They had less knowledge to build upon, sure, but they surely observes things around them. Prehistoric calendars (of which Stonehenge is the most dramatic example) show that the concept of a solar year as a period of time after which the Sun returns to a given position in the sky was very much understood.
You don’t have variations in day length at the equator, but you still see how high the Sun gets in the sky over the course of a day. For any given point between the two tropics (and that includes the equator), there are only two days in a year when the Sun reaches the zenith at noon (at the tropics itself it’s only one day a year, one of the solstices). So even your ancient, prehistoric, non-writing people would be able to observe that the Sun doesn’t reach quite as high a point today as it did a few weeks ago.
And what number did they place on “not quite as high”? I don’t think ancient people said “The sun at noon is 84.6 degrees above the horizon at the specific location where I was born. I was born when the sun at noon is 84.6 degrees above the horizon in the specific location where I was born! It’s my birthday!”
Double post
No, they wouldn’t, but they wouldn’t have to for the purpose of building a calendar. They would observe that there are two days a year in which the Sun gets higher than on any other days, and that after one of these days the culiminations get lower and lower until at some point they start to get higher again. They might not be able to quantify the elevation of the Sun on any given day, but this rhythm would be observable. They would also be able to observe that the time of decline after one of these days takes roughly three cycles of the Moon, and that the period of increasing culminations after that would also take roughly three cycles of the Moon. These are numbers which even a mathematically not very sophisticated society can handle. If they keep observing, they will also realise that the intervals I have just given are only roughly, but not exactly, three Moons; thereby our unsophisticated society has discovered the fundamental difficulty of combining lunar and solar calendars within one system.
They would get the time of year from the constellations, not so much from the sun. It’s easy to do and obvious. The constellations move by 30 degrees a month, or 1 degree a day. For comparison, the moon is about half a degree wide.
‘When such-and-such constellation or bright star is first visible in the east soon after sunset’ gives a pretty definite time of year.
So, clearly relevant to what the OP actually asked, which was “Did humans have a innate instinct about how old they were. Did they also instinctively know it was their birthday today.”?
No need to get snarky. My point was that if you keep your eyes open and observe the sky, you can make plenty of observations about solar and lunar (and, as @GreenWyvern has pointed out, stellar) cycles that provide the basis for a workable calendar. People certainly did that before they invented writing.
But this information would have to be passed on to you as you would have no memory of your birth. And even then probably wouldn’t be important to you until your teens at best.
We’re not making that assumption. We’re looking at the evidence of your average illiterate farmer in historic times paying attention to the seasons but not caring about the exact date or their exact year of birth and extrapolating that to the priorities of pre-historic peoples.
I think that there is consensus that some people may have noted the passing of the years and seasons. That, however, is no reason to believe that anyone would have been concerned about how old they were, except in the most general terms.
Since there were no dates, there could have been no birthdays.
Astrologers and priests might have, but most people didn’t have the time or use for that kind of precision.
Yeah, i was listening to the crickets last night, and thinking, “that’s a late summer chorus”.
I doubt ancient people tracked their ages, because even modern people mostly only do that due to external requirements for things like insurance and taxes. It’s common for older adults to have to think to remember exactly how old they are.
But i bet they did have a good sense of what time of year it was, at least in the temperate and cold biomes where it matters a lot. It’s important to know, “it’s autumn, winter is coming, i need to lay in supplies”, or for that matter, “it’s early summer, if i try to store vegetables they will rot in the heat”.
And there are tons of indications as to what time of year it is. The stars give you a precise measurement, but the sounds of bird song and insects get you fairly close, as do the color/texture of leaves on many plants, which plants are in bloom, what is sprouting, which birds you see, and just your own memory of recent weather and day-length.
That’s right. A particular example is the first appearance of the star Sirius in the pre-dawn morning. In ancient Egypt this occurred shortly before the Nile floods; and so was seen as quite significant.
In the case of the people I’ve been looking at it became important because they had been charged with crimes, and the 19th century was the great flourishing of data-driven crime management. Comprehensive description of perps had to include age. It did not necessarily drive anything different or specific, but reflected the idea that the law was objective and clinical in its execution.
Trying not to generalise, but many traditional cultures use age categories or cohorts to manage a person’s journey through life. You are of a certain cohort because, say, you’ve started growing pubes and gone through this specific bunch of age-related rituals which mark your passage from the previous cohort. That places you into a context that is meaningful to other people and in your society.
There is probably little meaningful difference between a 45 and a 55 year old in most contexts, even in our culture. Its probably largely a creation of capitalism wanting to sell us more shit.
And it was probably less important to know the exact date than to know the seasonal rhythm with all it’s variability. You don’t plant on a specific date, you plant when several factors align to let you get the seeds in and allow you to expect a late freeze (or other weather) wont kill them. The approximate height of the Sun and the local climate is important, but plain old Weather is also essential.
Do you think birth-constellations (zodiac) was a basis for any kind of individual birthday celebration? Is there evidence for this in say, prehistoric/ancient Egyptians celebrate birthdays when their decan (10 degree slice of the celestial sphere) came around?
I want to say… it’s been a long time since I had any interest in Egyptology… I think they celebrated supposed ‘birthdays’ of the Gods, anniversaries of their ascension into god-hood.
~Max
Astrology was a big deal in Egypt for thousands of years, and for that you need to know the exact birthdate.
But going back to prehistory…
Scattered tribes often met up for festivals at specific dates. We see that with the Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, and African cultures. Places like Stonehenge and Gobekli Tepe were probably also connected with yearly meetups.
Now if you are travelling some distance to a festival to get there on a particular date, the summer solstice or whatever, you need to know when to start. I’m sure arriving a few days earlier wouldn’t have mattered, but you still needed to have a fairly accurate idea of the date.