eli5 I am wondering how the concept of time was first discovered and how? When did human began using “time” in their activities?
In: Technology
I mean as soon as you see something moving and see something moving at different speeds you’d have some idea of “time”. And as soon as you find something that acts periodically meaning it cycles through a defined set of states, you could use one cycle of that machine to measure time.
So you could simply measure activities. Like for example “Morgen” ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgen)) which is German for “morning” is the area that a farmer could idk plough at one morning (probably from sun rise to noon).
So it’s most likely prehistoric that people realized that time could be a useful thing to think about.
so to my knowledge it al started somewhat 2000 b.c in ancient egypt. Egyptians first used the sun dials to measure time, thus they measured the time from sunrise to sunset and divided them into 12 parts, and then, the need to measure time in night-time pushed them to invent sandclocks and water clocks, the accuracy of these methods weren’t high but they did the job. as for the actual concept of time i think it was clear from the start, that there is time, ancient humans noticed that the shiny thing in the sky is moving and it eventually goes down and comes back up. the “time machines” were first invented in Europe in the 13th century.
It happened far too long ago for us to know for certain, but early hunters would have judged that after/around dawn would be a good time to start a hunt.
The passage of time is marked by regularly occurring events in our solar system like the appearance of the sun in the East (a day), the appearance of the full moon, (about a month), the apparent motion of star groups (a year). This awareness constructs a time frame.
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