- By : Mr. Satish Gupta
- Date: 05-08-2013
- Views : 1234
- [Takamaka, Seychelles]
Scientists in Scotland believe they’ve found the place where time itself was invented.
British archaeologists have announced the discovery of what is believed to be the world’s oldest calendar. Based on an original excavation in 2004 in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, a team of scientists from the University of Birmingham discovered a Mesolithic calendar — dating back 10,000 years — fashioned out of pits that tracked the wax and wane of the moon’s cycles.
The site at a field in Crathes Castle (apparently also one of the best places in Scotland to look for bats) is the first time-measuring device known to man, and predates ancient calendars from Bronze Age Mesopotamia by nearly 5,000 years.
Professor Vincent Gaffney of Birmingham University led the discovery of the 12 pits. “What we are looking at here is a very important step in humanity’s earliest formal construction of time, even the start of history itself.”
Gaffney explains that the shapes were dug to mimic the various shapes of the moon — waxing, waning, crescent and full moon. “They’re all there, and arranged in a 50-metre-long arc,” he says. The shape representing the full moon is in the centre of the 12 pits, roughly two metres diameter.
The arc of 12 pits are aligned with a notch in the Scottish landscape where the sun would have risen at the midwinter solstice — allowing the 10,000-year-old society to calibrate the solar year with the calendar year. Scientific evidence suggests the pits were reshaped many times, and the calendar was in use for a staggering 4,000 years — from the early Mesolithic period (8,000 BCE) to the Neolithic period (4,000 BCE).
Scientists discovered the 12 pits (echoing the 12 months of the year) align with the midwinter solstice, and would have helped the hunter-gatherer population at the time more accurately track the passing of the seasons. The midwinter solstice also represented the birth of a new year, and is close to the beginning of the calendar year we now use.
Researchers suggest the calendar could have been used for practical reasons — predicting when salmon might have started their run — as well as spiritual reasons, such as for Shamans to predict the seasons or behaviours of the moon.
Scientist Richard Bates, who also worked on the discovery, said the calendar demonstrates that Stone Age society was far more sophisticated than previously thought.
You could say the field at Crathes Castle may very well have been the place where time itself was invented.
