The First Calendar

更新：2023-11-22

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[00:01.43]Lesson 38
[00:03.43]The first calendar
[00:12.22]What is the importance of the dots, lines, and symbols engraved on stone, bones and ivory?
[00:22.14]Future historians will be in a unique position when they come to record the history of our own times.
[00:29.57]They will hardly know which facts to select from the great mass of evidence that steadily accumulates.
[00:37.20]What is more, they will not have to rely solely on the written word.
[00:42.25]Films, videos, CDs and CD-ROMs are just some of the bewildering amount of information they will have.
[00:50.83]They will be able, as it were, to see and hear us in action.
[00:55.61]But the historian attempting to reconstruct the distant past is always faced with a difficult task.
[01:03.25]He has to deduce what he can from the few scanty clues available.
[01:08.60]Even seemingly insignificant remains can shed interesting light on the history of early man.
[01:15.47]Up to now, historians have assumed that calendars came into being with the advent of agriculture,
[01:22.26]for then man was faced with a real need to understand something about the seasons.
[01:28.07]Recent scientific evidence seems to indicate that this assumption is incorrect.
[01:34.48]Historians have long been puzzled by dots, lines and symbols
[01:39.52]which have been engraved on walls, bones, and the ivory tusks of mammoths.
[01:45.64]The nomads who made these markings lived by hunting and fishing during the last Ice Age
[01:51.69]which began about 35, 000 B.C.and ended about 10, 000 B.C.
[01:58.93]By correlating markings made in various parts of the world,
[02:02.97]historians have been able to read this difficult code.
[02:07.17]They have found that it is connected with the passage of days and the phases of the moon.
[02:13.25]It is, in fact, a primitive type of calendar.
[02:17.51]It has long been known that the hunting scenes depicted on walls were not simply a form of artistic expression.
[02:25.14]They had a definite meaning, for they were as near as early man could get to writing.
[02:31.42]It is possible that there is a definite relation between these paintings and the markings that sometimes accompany them.
[02:39.41]It seems that man was making a real effort to understand the seasons 20, 000 years earlier than has been supposed.