eli5 What is the concept of months? Why Feb has only 28 while some have 31? When did the concept of 365 days’ year come in people?

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eli5 What is the concept of months? Why Feb has only 28 while some have 31? When did the concept of 365 days’ year come in people?

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The concept of months comes originally from the phases of the moon.

People could look up into the sky and notice that the moon regularly went through phases and that the time it took for that cycle was the same every time.

The concept of day simply comes from the sun rising and setting and the concept of year comes from the very noticeable change of the seasons.

So people even very far back in time had a natural calender in the sky that they could use to measure the passage of time.

The problem was that none of the natural units they had fit which each other.

A lunar cycle is not a full number of days and a year is not a full number of natural moon cycles or a full number of days.

So people decided to fudge a bit and make a month not a full lunar cycle but something that could be evenly divided into days and did the same for years too.

There were even smaller units of half moons and quarter moons invented by some people which we continue today as weeks and the somewhat obscure except for that popular online game fortnight.

The Babylonians were the ones who codified the basis for our modern timekeeping that we use today and the Romans fixed the calender that ours is based on and gave us the uneven distribution of days per month.

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