The World’s Oldest Calendar

Calendars are so ubiquitous that the idea that somebody actually had to invent them is a bit difficult to wrap your head around. The calendar has played such an integral role in the history of human civilization that Civilization tends to make it a technology you research shortly around roughly the same time as Agriculture and The Wheel.

Nevertheless, there was presumably a time without calendars, and that in turn suggests the existence of a first calendar. In a newly published study, archeologists from the University of Birmingham announced that they believed that they had found a new leading contender for that position – specifically, that a monument discovered in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 2004, is actually a near 10,000 year old calendar.

The hunter-gatherer peoples who created this calendar did so some three thousand years before formal calendars would appear in Mesopotamia. According to Professor Vince Gaffney, the evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies in Stone Age Scotland had both the need and sophistication to track time across the years and correct for seasonal drift of the lunar year, and that this occurred nearly five thousand years before the first formal calendars known in the Near East.

Incredibly,  by creating their monument, the hunter-gatherers who engineered this calendar may have helped define a concept that still puzzles us today: time itself.

Watch a Video Describing the Calendar:

Image and Video Courtesy of The University of Birmingham