First civilization to Record measurements
Do you often wish you could throttle the folks who invented time and time keeping devices? These contraptions cut into your leisure time by making it almost impossible to enjoy “a nice relaxing day”! Well, here are some of the sparse historical facts, and now you can know whom to blame for your lack of leisure - The ancient astronomers! Your very own astronomical kin.
Early on, humans started keeping time in one way or another for a variety of reasons. They must have noticed the regularity of the rising and setting of the sun and needed to have accurate measurements of such events. Notches which were carved on the discovered artifacts of early humans have been interpreted as being tally marks or counters, as a means of keeping track of the seasons and times of the year, and, importantly, as records of the lunar cycle. Early humans were keeping records early on. A marked bone which was probably used as a record of months and lunar phases and which was from approximately 9000 to 8001 BC or as late as 6500 BC was found in Ishango, which is now Zaire. Primitive hunter-gatherers had already detected patterns in the apparent motions of the stars and possibly even in the real motions of the planets through the night sky. These same traditions appeared later in Egypt and in Central America and are thought to have been associated with specific apparent motions of Sirius and Venus.