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