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