How Did People Tell Time Before Clocks?

It's 3:47 PM and you check your phone again. How did people tell time before clocks? For 300,000 years, they read the sun, shadows, stars and cattle. You live by minutes, alarms and deadlines, but your brain was built for a very different kind of time. You travel from a 5,000-year-old tomb in Ireland that catches one sunrise a year to Egyptian star clocks, a Roman sundial that showed the wrong time for 99 years, and a man who lost almost a month in a cave with no clock. You see why one shared, ticking time is only about 140 years old, and why your body still works like a sun tracker. 00:00 Why Time Feels Like a Threat 00:41 Life Before Clocks 02:23 Egypt: Shadows and Stars 04:04 Rome's Wrong Sundial 05:47 The Man Who Lost a Month 07:49 When Every Town Had Its Own Time 09:24 Task Time vs Clock Time 10:16 Living Without Clocks Today Sources: • Siffre, M. (1964). Beyond Time. McGraw-Hill. • Czeisler, C. A. et al. (1999). Stability, precision, and near-24-hour period of the human circadian pacemaker. Science. • Thompson, E. P. (1967). Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. Past & Present, 38. • Yetish, G. et al. (2015). Natural sleep and its seasonal variations in three pre-industrial societies. Current Biology. Subscribe for more short stories about why your brain feels out of place in the modern world. Comment below: when did you last do something without checking the time once? #psychology #history #circadianrhythm