Oldest lunar calendar in the world is 10 thousand years old
Evidence suggests that the hunter-gatherer societies of Mesolithic Scotland had the need and ability to keep track of time, at least 5,000 years before the first calendars were developed in Mesopotamia. In this way, the research marks an important step towards the formal understanding of time and, therefore, of history itself.
Some discoveries forces us to review the cultural evolution of humanity. One example is the analysis of the ancient archaeological site of Warren Campo, in Scotland, discovered in 2004 by the National Trust for Scotland.
The site, dating back to around 8000 BC, contains a long row of 12 wells. Analyses, obtained with the help of specially created software capable of analyzing the relationship between the distance of the wells, the topography of the site and the movements of the sun and moon, convinced archaeologists that the wells represent the months of year and the lunar phases of the month. Keeping track of time would have been immensely important to the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer community, especially economically and spiritually.
We thus find ourselves faced with what seems to be the oldest lunar calendar ever discovered on the planet. And this is not a primitive calendar. The calendar is aligned in such a way as to allow the observation of the sunrise in mid-winter, so that the lunar calendar could be brought back into line with the solar year.
In short, the calendar demonstrates once again that our ancestors were not as primitive as history books make us believe. Stone Age society 10,000 years ago was much more sophisticated than we had previously suspected and the site has implications for understanding how Mesolithic society developed in economic, social and cosmological terms.
The site was created around 8000 BC and used, surprisingly, for around 4000 years. The wells were periodically cut (probably hundreds of times over the millennia). It is therefore impossible to understand whether they originally served to support wooden poles or megalithic stones.
However, the variation in depth of the wells suggests the high complexity of the site, in which each lunar month is divided into three 'ten-day weeks', to represent the waxing moon, the full moon and the waning moon.
The calendar would have helped them pinpoint the precise moment when the herds of animals began their migrations or the most likely moment when the salmon would begin to move up the rivers. And it cannot be ruled out that the calendar was also used by shamans, so as to be able to keep under control the beginning of the seasons and the related holidays.
Evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies of Mesolithic Scotland had the need and ability to keep track of time, at least 5,000 years before the first calendars were developed in Mesopotamia.
