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Lesson 38 The first calender 最早的日历 Future historians will be in a unique position when they come torecord the history of our own times. They will hardly know which facts toselect 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 andCD-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 historianattempting to reconstruct the distant past is always faced with a difficulttask. He has to deduce what he can from the few scanty clues available. Evenseemingly insignificant remains can shed interesting light on the history ofearly man. Up to now, historians have assumed that calendars came into beingwith the advent of agriculture, for then man was faced with a real need tounderstand something about the seasons. Recent scientific evidence seems toindicate that this assumption is incorrect. Historians have long been puzzled by dots, lines and symbols whichhave been engraved on walls, bones, and the ivory tusks of mammoths. The nomadswho made these markings lived by hunting and fishing during the last Ice Agewhich began about 35,000 B.C. and ended about 10,000 B.C. By correlatingmarkings made in various parts of the world, historians have been able to readthis difficult code. They have found that it is connected with the passage ofdays 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 notsimply a form of artistic expression. They had a definite meaning, for theywere as near as early man could get to writing. It is possible that there is adefinite relation between these paintings and the markings that sometimesaccompany them. It seems that man was making a real effort to understand theseasons 20,000 years earlier than has been supposed. | 
