In the southern hemisphere, seasons are inverted compared to the northern hemisphere. Before the current knowledge that this is caused by Earth’s tilt compared to its rotation around the sun, how did people explain this?
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Even though our precise scientific understanding of the mechanisms involved wasn’t always there, we have known, since pre-recorded history that there was a link between the sun’s path across the sky and the seasons and used the former to predict the latter.
Additionally, we have known that the Earth was round and tilted since antiquity, so all of that has always been linked in our understanding of seasons (with the goal of mastering agriculture).
Understanding that, because of the tilt, the energy of the sun is dispersed over a wider area in one hemisphere and concentrated in another, and this causes the discrepancy in heat and seasons probably came later. Before that there really wasn’t a need to create an explanation. It simply was.
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