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[ti:The First Calendar]
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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