No wonder the British are known for punctuality!
Scotland's prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes, widely seen as civilization's late starters, may have been among the first humans to form a concept of time, archaeologists have found.
They have found evidence that the prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes built a giant "year clock" capable of tracking the passing of lunar months and linking these to the changing of the seasons, so enabling them to prepare for changes in food supply.
The structure, in a field near Banchory in Aberdeenshire, dates back 10,000 years, meaning it predates the calendar systems created by the ancient Mesopotamians 5,000 years ago, which had been thought the world's oldest.
"The capacity to conceptualize and measure time is among the most important achievements of human societies, and the issue of when time was 'created' by humankind is critical in understanding how society developed," said Vincent Gaffney, professor of landscape archaeology at Birmingham University.
His team analyzed a site at Warren Field that previous excavations showed had once been home to Mesolithic (middle Stone Age) hunter-gatherers.
Those excavations had revealed a set of pits, perhaps used to hold large posts or stones, but whose real purpose remained mysterious.
Gaffney and his colleagues studied the orientation of the pits, finding they were aligned with key astronomical events such as the phases of the moon and the midwinter sunrise, The Sunday Times reported.
They were to issue a full report on their findings but an abstract released on Birmingham University's website summarized the findings.
"A pit structure, discovered in Aberdeenshire and dated to the 8th millennium BC, has been re-analyzed and appears to demonstrate a basic calendrical function," the report said.
"The site may provide the earliest evidence currently available for 'time reckoning' as the pit group appears to mimic the phases of the moon and is structured to track lunar months. It also aligns on the midwinter sunrise framed within a prominent point on the horizon," it said.
The ability to track the midwinter Sun hints at a level of sophistication unsuspected in prehistoric Scots.
Most early calendars were designed to track lunar months, but could not tell their users when a year had passed. This is because lunar months are not in step with the year, which is measured by the time taken for the Earth to orbit the Sun.
Aberdeenshire's Stone Age inhabitants appear to have noticed this problem, however, and used the alignment of the sun with particular posts within their calendar structure to work out when the midwinter solstice had arrived, so marking the end of a year.
Then they used this information to "reset" the lunar clock system with which they marked the passing of the months within the next year.
Scotland's prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes, widely seen as civilization's late starters, may have been among the first humans to form a concept of time, archaeologists have found.
They have found evidence that the prehistoric hunter-gatherer tribes built a giant "year clock" capable of tracking the passing of lunar months and linking these to the changing of the seasons, so enabling them to prepare for changes in food supply.
The structure, in a field near Banchory in Aberdeenshire, dates back 10,000 years, meaning it predates the calendar systems created by the ancient Mesopotamians 5,000 years ago, which had been thought the world's oldest.
"The capacity to conceptualize and measure time is among the most important achievements of human societies, and the issue of when time was 'created' by humankind is critical in understanding how society developed," said Vincent Gaffney, professor of landscape archaeology at Birmingham University.
His team analyzed a site at Warren Field that previous excavations showed had once been home to Mesolithic (middle Stone Age) hunter-gatherers.
Those excavations had revealed a set of pits, perhaps used to hold large posts or stones, but whose real purpose remained mysterious.
Gaffney and his colleagues studied the orientation of the pits, finding they were aligned with key astronomical events such as the phases of the moon and the midwinter sunrise, The Sunday Times reported.
They were to issue a full report on their findings but an abstract released on Birmingham University's website summarized the findings.
"A pit structure, discovered in Aberdeenshire and dated to the 8th millennium BC, has been re-analyzed and appears to demonstrate a basic calendrical function," the report said.
"The site may provide the earliest evidence currently available for 'time reckoning' as the pit group appears to mimic the phases of the moon and is structured to track lunar months. It also aligns on the midwinter sunrise framed within a prominent point on the horizon," it said.
The ability to track the midwinter Sun hints at a level of sophistication unsuspected in prehistoric Scots.
Most early calendars were designed to track lunar months, but could not tell their users when a year had passed. This is because lunar months are not in step with the year, which is measured by the time taken for the Earth to orbit the Sun.
Aberdeenshire's Stone Age inhabitants appear to have noticed this problem, however, and used the alignment of the sun with particular posts within their calendar structure to work out when the midwinter solstice had arrived, so marking the end of a year.
Then they used this information to "reset" the lunar clock system with which they marked the passing of the months within the next year.
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