Once Upon A Time In The Past

At some point someone decided things needed to measured by specific intervals. 

That someone must have had a burning desire to know when something that was expected to occur in the future was actually going to occur, plus or minus.

Maybe it was an annual migration or maybe it was the beginning or end of a planting season, or possibly it was when a pregnant woman was due to give birth. 

Whatever it was, it spurned someone to figure out a way to count time.

Counting time required being able to keep track of life, of nature itself, whether one was conscious of it or not.

Because things happen whether we are aware of them or not.

And things happening, happen in time.

Try to imagine the difficulty this first person would have had explaining just exactly what an "interval" was to someone who not only did not have the mental capacity to understand it, but most likely just didn't care.

I mean, for most early humans life was probably just about gathering food, keeping oneself safe, (defending or attacking a particular plot of ground?), procreating, and sleeping.

For someone to come along and say, "Hey, I've noticed that the large fiery orb in the sky comes up over in that direction and sets over in that direction very regularly. In fact, it happens every time we are so tired we must lay down and enter the dreamworld and then get up after a journey into the dreamworld. Isn't that something?"

Blank stares. That person must have encountered hundreds if not thousands of blank stares. And probably a lot of people replying, "so what?"

The first person who conceived of the idea that not only could intervals be measured, but that doing such could prove to be very useful, would have had to have experienced an ungodly number of epiphanies as they worked to sort the interval thing out. 

It isn't hard to imagine that person sitting on a rock contemplating intervals between when things start and when they end and noticing that in the early hours of the morning the shadow created by a tree when the light from the large fiery orb in the sky strikes it is on one side, and at the end of the day the shadow is on the opposite side.

I can see that person getting very excited when that realization hit, jumping up and down with this huge fresh new slice of knowledge in their brain, trying to figure out how to record this information and share it with others.

At some point the idea of sticking a tree branch into the ground and marking with a rock the exact location where the first shadow appeared, and marking with a second rock the exact location where the last shadow appeared, occurred to this person.

Maybe at that point someone else grasped the idea of intervals and got in on it, or maybe the first person had to do a little more work and place a rock where the shadow fell halfway between the first two rocks and exclaim, "Look, this is the point when we have experienced half of our time between trips to dreamland. From this point on we are halfway to our next trip to dreamland!"

Or something like that. Maybe that person had to be even more specific, continuously adding rocks between the other rocks and explaining that the additional rocks meant that they were three rocks away from when they left dreamland and that they were now nine rocks away from the next trip to dreamland.

From there maybe then other big brains got in on it and eventually figured out how to break down trips to dreamland into days, and that the days actually had two periods, one of light and one of dark. 

Then seasons got figured out, and years were broken down into quarters and months (someone staring at the moon probably got into the game at that point).

Anyway, somehow, probably not easily and certainly not without argument, the concept of time and how to measure it was figured out and has been refined over the millennia, which brings me to the point of this little discourse.

Happy New Year!