Archaeologists have discovered an ancient calendar marking "the beginning of time."
The calendar was discovered in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and is believe to date back to a hunter-gatherer society from around 8,000 BC, a University of Birmingham press release reported.
The artifact is the oldest-known example of humans keeping track of time. Before this groundbreaking discovery the oldest calendar was thought to be created around 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, this finding is twice as old.
"For pre-historic hunter-gatherer communities, knowing what food resources were available at different times of the year was crucial to survival. These communities relied on hunting migrating animals and the consequences of missing these events were potential starvation. They needed to carefully note the seasons to be prepared for when that food resource passed through, so from this perspective, our interpretation of this site as a seasonal calendar makes sense," Dr. Christopher Gaffney, of the University of Bradford, said.
The 10,000-year-old calendar is believed to have tracked lunar phases to categorize time into months and even years.
"The evidence suggests that hunter gatherer societies in Scotland had both the need and sophistication to track time across the years, to correct for seasonal drift of the lunar year and that this occurred nearly 5,000 years before the first formal calendars known in the Near East," Project leader Vince Gaffney, Professor of Landscape Archaeology at the University of Birmingham, said. "In doing so, this illustrates one important step towards the formal construction of time and therefore history itself."
The Warren Field site "aligns on the Midwinter sunrise, providing an annual astronomic correction in order to maintain the link between the passage of time, indicated by the Moon, the asynchronous solar year and the associated seasons," according to the press release.
"The site did not mark particular moonrises as the changing patterns of moonrise are far too complex - the argument is that it represents a combination of several different cycles which can be used to track time symbolically and practically," Clive Ruggles, Emeritus Professor of Archaeoastronomy at the University of Leicester, who participated in the study, said.
"There are certainly hunter-gatherer societies who use the phase cycles of the moon to help synchronized different seasonal activities but it is remarkable that this could have been monumentalized at such an early period," he said.
The calendar was discovered when the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) noticed unusual crop markings during aerial surveillance of the countryside.
"We have been taking photographs of the Scottish landscape for nearly 40 years, recording thousands of archaeological sites that would never have been detected from the ground. Warren Field stands out as something special, however. It is remarkable to think that our aerial survey may have helped to find the place where time itself was invented," Dave Cowley, Aerial Survey projects manager at RCAHMS, said.
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