Debate about the Earliest Calendars

►Some researchers believe that we can trace the

written calendar back more than 20,000 years to the last
ice age. In particular, Alexander Marshack has interpreted
cut marks found on bits of bone from central Africa and
Paleolithic caves in France to be rudimentary forms of an
early lunar calendar. The evidence lies in distinct clusters
of cut marks on the bones – marks that could not have
been by chance. The marks must have been made by
using a sharp cutting tool or by twisting a pointed object to
form a hole in the surface of the bones. According to
Marshack, each mark represents a day and these marks
are grouped in patterns of 14 or 15 days. This interval
would correspond to the times between the first sighting of
a crescent moon and the full moon, and the interval
between a full moon and the beginning a new moon cycle.

According to Marshack, there would have been

several motives for keeping a lunar record. A major
portion of the lunar-phase cycle provides extended light
for accomplishing many useful activities. Also, it helps to
plan if one knows or can anticipate when additional
daylight will come. Keeping track of lunar events would
offer the Paleolithic inhabitants of western Europe a
means of abstractly correlating what Marshack calls “time-
factored” events – those that occur sequentially in a
predictable manner – through a process that lends itself
readily to measurement. These notations could represent
the foundation of the associative process – the first step in
the evolution of traditional writing, where a mark stands for
a thing, in this case, one day. Though the best-known
bone calendar stretches but two and a half months, an
extended series of such records could have led early
hunter-gatherers to deduce that the period from human
conception to birth was nine moons; that after two moons,
a particular supply of berries would dry up; or that after
every 12 or 13 moons, all the nearby streams would swell
to capacity.

Psychologically, it is comforting to think that the use of

symbols, for example, in writing might go back such a long
way. To imagine that our earliest ancestors were abstract
thinkers like us offers a broader and higher historical
pyramid to support our modern accomplishments. Though
his basic ideas about the beginning of the arithmetic
intellect in humans are accepted by a majority of
anthropologists, Marshack’s work on lunar calendars,
even after 30 years, remains somewhat controversial.
Some critics say permanent calendar keeping is not
consistent with what we know about the level of
conceptual sophistication of these early people. Counting
the days would have been too narrow and too abstract an
idea for them to employ. Besides, cave dwellers did not
need to count days. They knew when to hunt, when to
gather, and they certainly could tell when the extended
light of the moon would come, simply by spotting the
moon after sunset. Why bother to write it all down? The
supposed benefits of Marshack’s lunar calendars would
have amounted to unnecessary intellectual baggage in the
seminomadic life of early peoples.

Other opponents have suggested that Marshack’s

bones contain no ordered pattern at all, that he has not
provided enough examples, and that those he offers
include a lot of unsupported interpretations. Are these
marks only decorations, or were the bones simply tool-
sharpening devices? Slash marks along the edges of
some of Marshack’s bones resemble the knife-sharpening
cuts made by soldiers that can be seen on the stone
pillars throughout the Nile valley. Likewise, early people
could have used bones as a means to sharpen the point
of a tool rather than to record days in the lunar cycle.
Recent experimentation with stone and bone tools
suggests that the multiple markings that appear on
Marshack’s bones could have been made without much
effort in a few hours. Therefore, if there is a pattern, it may
be that only the overall design made in few hours was
important, in which case the pattern would not consist of
individually meaningful marks for days.

These considerations can be taken to argue against the

calendar hypothesis, though they do not disprove it.