The First Calendar

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新概念英语第三册 培养技能 英音

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第 38 集

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  • Lesson 38

  • The first calendar

  • What is the importance of the dots, lines, and symbols engraved on stone, bones and ivory?

  • Future historians will be in a unique position when they come to record the history of our own times.

  • They will hardly know which facts to select 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 and CD-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 historian attempting to reconstruct the distant past is always faced with a difficult task.

  • He has to deduce what he can from the few scanty clues available.

  • Even seemingly insignificant remains can shed interesting light on the history of early man.

  • Up to now, historians have assumed that calendars came into being with the advent of agriculture,

  • for then man was faced with a real need to understand something about the seasons.

  • Recent scientific evidence seems to indicate that this assumption is incorrect.

  • Historians have long been puzzled by dots, lines and symbols which have been engraved on walls, bones, and the ivory tusks of mammoths.

  • The nomads who made these markings lived by hunting and fishing during the last Ice Age which began about 35, 000 B.C. and ended about 10, 000 B.C.

  • By correlating markings made in various parts of the world,

  • historians have been able to read this difficult code.

  • They have found that it is connected with the passage of days and the phases of the moon.

  • It is, in fact, a primitive type of calendar.