Ancient Humans Made the First Calendar on a Bone

"You're twelve years old, 20,000 years ago, and your family missed the herd by two days. Two days late could mean a winter with no food. So how did people with no clocks, no phones and no calendars know what day it was? In this video we follow the first timekeepers. We start with the Lebombo bone, a 43,000-year-old bone with 29 cuts, almost exactly one cycle of the moon. Then we visit Ice Age cave paintings, where a London furniture restorer named Ben Bacon and a team of scientists think the dots and lines may be a moon calendar for animal seasons. Next we learn why the moon slowly drifts away from the seasons, and how ancient people may have fixed it with the winter sun. We visit a 10,000-year-old calendar of pits in Warren Field, Scotland. We end at Newgrange in Ireland, a 5,000-year-old tomb whose dark room still fills with gold light on the shortest days of winter. Chapters: 0:00 Two days late 0:37 How did they know the date? 0:59 The Lebombo bone: 29 marks 1:40 Nature's clock 2:24 Grandma trusts the moon 3:13 The secret in the cave paintings 3:46 Ben Bacon cracks the code 4:39 So why were we late? 4:48 The moon's secret 5:46 The sun fixes the moon 6:08 Warren Field: a calendar in the dirt 6:56 Newgrange 8:29 We still live by their clock 8:55 What comes next Would you have trusted the moon or the birds? Tell us in the comments. Sources: d'Errico et al., Lebombo bone (Border Cave); Bacon et al., Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2023); Gaffney et al., Internet Archaeology (2013), Warren Field; O'Kelly, Newgrange winter solstice. #AncientHumans #Prehistory #History "