The Gregorian Calendar is the most widely used civil calendar in the world. One of its main differences from other calendar systems is the use of the leap year. The explanation of leap-years can be found when looking at how the Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian calendar
Why do Leap Years happen?
As I was growing up one of my best friends was born on a leap year. The joke in our school was that while the rest of the class were excited to turn eight, he was stuck at two years old.
The situation used to perplex me. While he was certainly immature in many ways, he was by all logic and measurements, not a 2-year old.
We drifted as we went into secondary school and my thinking on the topic waned. However, the idea of a leap year came back to me recently.
Why do we have leap years at all?
A closer look at the calendar system shows that my school-yard oddity turned out to reveal a big problem with our calendar system.
The way we plan our year is a pretty big deal after all.
The Gregorian calendar is designed on a set of principles that include a leap-year every four years.
To understand why we need to look at the history of the Gregorian calendar. It reveals why we use leap years in the first place.
Here’s the full transcript of this episode:
Steven: Welcome to The Human Origin Project where we explore The Science of You. To keep up to date, go to our iTunes channel and subscribe and please leave a review if you enjoyed today’s show. Hello and welcome to the show.
Today we are going to be talking about a topic that every listener can relate to because we learn this system early in our school years and it’s the calendar system, the calendar system that we widely used today across the globe and where it came from.
You may not know that our calendar system was installed by Pope Gregory the 13th. And it was installed with a purpose to fix a previous problem with the Julian calendar. But we are going to go into what calendar systems really measure and is our current system the most accurate that we could have and what did ancient cultures use and where did the principles of our calendar system really come from?
I hope you enjoy today’s show. This is a topic that we will be covering a lot in future shows and also articles on the website. One thing that may surprise you is that ancient calendar systems are potentially far more accurate than the ones we use today. Let’s jump into the Gregorian calendar system.
Stefan: [0:01:18] Hi, Steve. How are you doing?
Steven: [0:01:21] I’m God, Stefan. How are you, man?
Stefan: [0:01:22] Yeah, not bad. Not bad. We were talking about how hot it was last time and it started raining the next day. I guess I got my wish. It’s cooling down a little bit which is nice.
Steven: [0:01:33] Pouring and what we should probably note too that this is being recorded very early in the morning. We normally record at night but this is a bit of an experiment. We always have to try and fit when you get these in. It’s a lot of work to put a show together. If this sounds different it’s because it’s very, very early here in the morning, still waking up.
Stefan: [0:01:58] Today, we are going to be talking about the calendar, specifically the Gregorian calendar system that we use today and just go through a bit of the history of it, why a calendar is important and how we got to understand time the way we do today.
Steven: [0:02:14] It’s a really interesting scientific part of society that we don’t really consider the day to day life but is absolutely fundamental across everyone on the planet really that we now use. For the most part, there is a calendar system that most people use across the world a/and there’s a reason for that.
What we found too is that there is a big evidence line as to what ancient people did with calendars and potentially misunderstandings with what we use today. But what I found so interesting is that the centre of any civilization is their calendar system.
There’s no more fundamental aspect. If you are living in society you can walk up to them and ask them the date and time, they can tell you by looking at their phone or watch. And that is very fundamental because if you imagine if that changes then you become very chaotic really in terms of communication.
Imagine trying to book an appointment with someone that works in a different calendar system. That’s why it becomes very fundamental to daily life. But you forget how these systems were formed, and that’s what we are going to go into today, the Gregorian calendar, which is the calendar, the system we use today and how it works and where it came from.
Stefan: [0:03:43] And I think it’s something that I found by looking at all these systems and thinking about the calendar systems differently to what day of the week it is, and what time it is and that sort of thing. Every ancient culture that you look at throughout history had derived their form of a calendar.
I guess from the Roman times onwards there is sort of a more global calendar but before that, it was every culture and sometimes slightly differently. They were all sort of following the same principles of observing the motions of the stars in the sky. The majority was just isolated but still looking at time in a similar way. But the more we’ve looked at the Gregorian calendar it seems to be built on very different foundations, I guess.
Steven: [0:04:32] Yeah, the foundations make sense to us now because we’ve lived in them. And this is why Human Origin Projects what we are about is finding those lines of evidence that tell us about our history. Calendar systems, it actually even just dawned on me when it was it was a long time ago when we first started looking at this.
The calendar system is an astronomical measure. That’s all it’s doing. So it’s actually measuring the motion of an astronomical body so, for instance, our planet around the sun. But there are many other motions as well and many other calendars looked at this. But let’s start with the Gregorian calendar. It was implemented in 1582 by Pope Gregory the 13th.
Stefan: [0:05:25] Yeah, I think the 13th and so nearly 440 years ago it was put in. It took over from the Julian calendar I think which was the system put in by the Romans. The reason it was changed was because the Julian calendar would drift slightly every 128 years there will be an extra day added to the calendar, just naturally, there’d be a seasonal drift. So instead of Christmas day being on the 25th of December, in 128 years’ time, it would be on the 26th.
Steven: [0:06:04] It is confusing but it’s interesting to think that they are calendar systems are a little bit inaccurate. The reason being is that when we are measuring astronomical periods what they call the tropical year, the time that it takes the earth to rotate the sun actually doesn’t exactly equal 365 days.
It’s 365.2422 years which equates to the tropical year. This is a period of 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds and 138 milliseconds difference so a 24-hour day doesn’t fit exactly into a 365 year period. This is a problem because when you are using that time you are going to have a drift and that’s what we are going to look at as to why that happens.
It’s still happening today. There is seasonal drift and it’s simply from a potential misunderstanding of how calendars work. It was actually back in the French-Anglo war they had significant drift because of the way they calculated their time.
When you look at the records, the English record the date as being on the 12th of July, 1627 when the English were invading France but the French record it as the 22nd of July and 1627.
They agreed it was a Thursday, but that shows that the discrepancies between the calendar can have a significant difference. Imagine if you are defending for a war on the 22nd and they actually have on the 12th. You are not really going to get the exact date of the war. It shows how important that can be.
Stefan: [0:07:52] Yeah, I think that they just had the idea of late years a bit different and just that little change equated to 10 days over that period which is such a strange concept. Imagine trying to meet up with a friend on whatever the date is and then they are arriving 10 days later.
Steven: [0:08:16] I remember leap years being a funny concept. I had a friend who was born on a leap year. I think we were probably eight or nine and we used to say that he was only really two or three because then he actually had two birthdays. That always seems silly to me because whilst he was a bit immature definitely he was older than me and so I always thought that was a strange concept.
But the reason is that if you don’t have leap years in a Gregorian system that the seasons do drift. So every four years because of that difference between the tropical and the hour calculation the season will drift one day.
Stefan: [0:08:58] Yeah, it’s a long time if you think about in the span of one lifetime. That’s a week every 28 years of change.
Steven: [0:09:10] And the season will drift. That means that summer would be a week late in 28 years’ time so roughly within their lifetime it would happen. It doesn’t seem significant. You might say, well, that’s not significant but when the purpose of a calendar is to actually calculate the time that’s a direct failure of that.
Stefan: [0:09:33] It has one job.
Steven: [0:09:34] Yeah, one job, calendar. Do your job.
Stefan: [0:09:37] Yeah. As the calendar was developing and getting to its current state they’d add a festival here or a political event there to try and make up for this slow drift to make the public catch up or make the population catch up to where the actual date lied.
But it was these problems that kept occurring, these short little Band-Aid sort of fixes that didn’t really get to the root of the problem of it. We are still using it and it still drifts slightly but it’s still not a perfect system.
Steven: [0:10:18] Yeah. Well, let’s get into the numbers of that because it’s interesting. It was in 46 BC that Julius Caesar implemented the Julian calendar. Many of the Roman Ceasars just popped a month in after themselves, I think it’s August, July and so forth.
But what he was trying to do is fix that drift system. So what he did was he added a day to make to account for the difference between the tropical year and the calendar year and so he added one day every year. That actually fixed the system and instead of drifting one day every four years it would now drift one day every 128 years.
That seemed like a fixed like right, we are good now, 128 years can’t be that significant. But by the 16th Century that became a problem that there were 10 days drift by then. There were issues that came along and it actually was fixed by Pope Gregory with a more accurate system.
So Caesar added a leap year so the concept of a leap year which is we still use today. But the Gregorian system is a fix to the Julian system So, they saw that there was this one day drifting every 128 and they added some extra rules to make it more accurate.
Stefan: [0:11:52] Yeah. I think the strange thing about this whole system, the Gregorian system we use is that it started off with a slightly convoluted broken system that was then patched up, that was then patched up again which we are still using today. So that the basis of it all which I find the most, the strangest concept, the basis for our timing system is slightly skew which it kind of throws everything out.
If you look back into other cultures’ calendars from ancient times it was purely astronomical. You were observing the moon and observing the sun and those motions, and calculating time based on natural phenomena occurring. Our system has taken that all almost out of the account to a degree and we are just floating in this in this calendar system that’s slightly wrong.
Steven: [0:12:54] Yeah, when you look at the history of that you see that we just trying to plug up. First of all, they just put festivals in but then seasons like right now we need to do this properly and add the leap year so one day every four years.
But then the Gregorian system as we said was just a patch up. And so all it does is adds some fixes to the Julian system which was not correct in the first place. So leap years happen on a multiple of four years but at 100 years they don’t.
Stefan: [0:13:28] So at a multiple four years the—
Steven: [0:13:32] Not multiple of four years, it is the one. It’s confusing.
Stefan: [0:13:40] Yeah. It gets so confusing when you just try and work out how to understand a leap year. I think it’s every four years if it’s a multiple of four it’s a leap year, but if it’s a multiple of 100 it’s not a leap year. 1800 was the leap year 1900 was a leap year but the year 2000 wasn’t because it was a multiple of 400.
Steven: [0:14:03] Of 100.
Stefan: [0:14:05] Oh, so if it’s a multiple of 100 it’s not a leap year but if it’s multiple 400. It becomes a leap year. So 1800 was not a leap year 1900 was not but the year 2000 was because it was a multiple a 400.
Steven: [0:14:19] Yeah. He added these extra caveats that made it more accurate. And so now the Gregorian calendar drifts one day every 3216 years with these caveats.
Stefan: [0:14:33] You can see when you look. Originally, it was every four years out of the year. And then because it was still drifting they added these new lines to the equation which you think if the equation needs amending you just have to start again, make it fresh and work from a new system instead of adding these sort of patches here and there. I guess if the foundation you are building on isn’t supported it’s only going to be a certain amount of time till it all falls apart.
Steven: [0:15:04] Well, I can kind of understand why that happened there because it wasn’t adopted large scale till 1752. So you can imagine if you are trying to put your calendar system, let’s say you are in Spanish civilization, it’s extremely helpful to you if people on other sides of the world are operating on your time and calendar system. And so in order to spread that if you are changing it all the time, that’s really not going to be helpful too which is what was basically happening, wasn’t it?
Stefan: [0:15:37] I can’t remember who said it but there was a quote about calendar systems. It was something like he who controls the calendar controls the world or something like that.
Steven: [0:15:45] Yeah. I can’t remember who that was. I have to look that up.
Stefan: [0:15:50] Yeah, it does make you think. And I guess there are a lot of political and religious reasons behind the calendar system so you’d be wanting to push different agendas not just the time and the date and that sort of thing.
But the idea of time, as we know it with the day broken up into 24 hours and using minutes and seconds as multiples of 60 that’s been around for thousands of years. I think it was first implemented in ancient Sumeria, something like 3000+ BC.
Steven: [0:16:30] Yeah and that’s basically like just dividing a circle into certain divisions, isn’t it? So it becomes a 60-second minute, 60-minute hour. That’s also built into the calendar system too and then the 24-hour day too, that comes from Sumeria as well?
Stefan: [0:16:53] Yeah. All the multiples of the timekeeping numbers that we use today originated in Sumeria. You can see it on the clock. If you look at a clock we have today it’s still the same idea where we have 12 hours on a circular plane. It was a similar thing that started in Sumerian with the circle, a flat disk divided into 30-degree arcs measuring the sun that way, measuring the time that way.
Steven: [0:17:20] Yeah, exactly. So time became a very linear flat concept whereas previously it was seen as very cyclical.
Stefan: [0:17:29] Yeah, I think that’s been such an interesting thing looking into the calendars because we’ve sort of been researching the ancient calendar systems from all over the world.
You find again, and again that these old systems are so much more three dimensional and open and aware of not just our little place on earth but what’s going on far out into space and sort of encompassing that, those natural motions into the natural motions of daily life.
I think you can see why that would be so important and I think to cut away from that and using a calendar system that’s just for practical reasons changes your mindset when you are thinking to two-dimensionally, you are thinking the time is flat.
Steven: [0:18:25] Yeah but you are looking at in on a flat plane. A clock is cyclical, I guess but, it does kind of lock us in this idea of it is linear. There’s definitely a shift in thinking that our current calendar system has. And when you look at the history of it, it might just be a misconception that we lost the idea of what the calendar is really doing.
Like geez, these days are inconvenient for us. It was actually two sciences that recommended a new calendar system because they were secret, for instance, Christmas Day, for instance, falling on different days of the week. We were saying before that it’s hard to calculate what day it’s going to be exactly in two weeks’ time on a date because it all doesn’t line up and then.
Stefan: [0:19:18] Yeah, that’s something that I’m really confused about. If I want to meet up with you in five weeks’ time what day of the week is it going to be on Tuesday in five weeks’ time? I have to sit there with either a calendar or a pen and paper and work it all out.
Whereas the old calendar systems that people would use in places like Egypt and China and the Middle East and ones that were very observational, it all fit together so nicely that you could talk about days in five weeks, you could talk about days in five years and you would know what day it is.
Whereas now I think no one knows that and that’s something that’s kind of been interesting for me realizing that that is something that was important to these ancient timekeeping systems.
Steven: [0:20:13] Yeah, and the solution proposed by these, it’s called the Hank Henry Permanent Calendar, wherever every day would fall on the same day, week of the year. That also is kind of more of an adjustment. It seems like they are fiddling more with the Gregorian in the modern context rather than actually going to the actual principles of what a calendar should be which is an astronomical measure of time.
Once you disconnect it from that the whole purpose of it is changed. When you look at the Gregorian calendar too, the 12 months, it is an adapted loony solar calendar. So it’s a purely solar calendar because we just measure the earth’s rotation around the sun. But the months are supposed to be divided into what was a calculation of the lunar cycle so the 28 or 29.5-day cycle of the lunar, which many calendars do calculate. There are actually 13 cycles in a year of the lunar calendar.
Stefan: [0:21:22] Yeah. A lot of the ancient calendar systems would be primarily lunar calendars. Each month would be a lunar month so you’d observe the moon as it went through some natural cycle and at the end of that would be the start of a new moon.
And because the lunar cycle is, I think it’s 11 days shorter than the solar year because each month—and that’s another thing with the Gregorian calendar, the length of each month changes. So you’ve got 30 days here, 31 days there, 30 days here in not a set pattern. That adds more confusion to this already kind of convoluted system but back to the lunar calendar.
Steven: [0:22:05] It’s that knuckle system, isn’t it?
Stefan: [0:22:07] Yeah.
Steven: [0:22:09] It doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s like you have to put your hands together.
Stefan: [0:22:18] So instead of these ancient cultures adding a leap day, a lot of them would add a late month which would just be another lunar month, because as the lunar year which would gradually pull away from the solar year each year would be 11 days shorter the next year it’d be 22.
When it was just enough, they’d add a whole new lunar month. So it was all in keeping track with the moon cycles, and then understanding that you need to reconcile those cycles with the solar cycles and they had these really simple systems to do it.
It just made a lot more sense because there was no fooling around. Things were occurring in the natural world and then you would relate that to things happening on earth. It wasn’t the other way around. We wouldn’t sort of fudge dates here and there and decide for ourselves, I guess.
Steven: [0:23:07] It makes complete sense and we are going to look at this in more detail. But clearly, the moon would have an impact on the earth’s rotation around the sun. It’s a sixth of the gravitational force of the earth. So maybe the reason why lunisolar calendars were so prevalent and the Hebrew calendar today is still really primarily lunar, isn’t it?
Stefan: [0:23:35] Yeah, I think so.
Steven: [0:23:36] There’s a calculation too if you use the calculations of the lunar cycles comparing to a purely solar cycle it’s far more accurate as well. We’ll cover the lunar calendar.
We are going to cover every calendar system because it’s important to know everyone and there are many around the world. The Chinese calendar is lunisolar and that’s how you calculate the Chinese New Year. It’s by the second new moon after the winter solstice.
Stefan: [0:24:06] Yeah and there are cultures all over the ancient world that would use these lunar cycles and because of that their months would be 28 days long so in Egypt, Polynesia, across the Middle East, in China, like we said. I think there’s a Druid culture in the British Isles that still use that calendar today. It’s a strange concept thinking that there are still people using ancient calendars. It’s kind of a nice thought thinking that there’s still a bit of this history left.
Steven: [0:24:40] Completely. And when you track it back as well from Roman to Greek times many cultures had many different calendars that they would use concurrently so they’d measure many different cycles. The Greeks, for instance, would use the Sothic cycle which was based on the rise of Sirius.
So they would actually wait until the rise of Sirius before setting the New Year. So they wouldn’t just have this arbitrary New Year date which the Gregorian calendar and the Romans instituted. They would wait until the astronomical rise of Sirius.
The interesting part of this is it actually goes back to a tradition in Egypt and there are other cultures that use and focus on Sirius as well as for the basis of the starting of the year and there are potentially a lot of implications for that.
But you start to see that from Egypt they used to say that the rise Sirius related to the flooding of the Nile but it doesn’t quite line up that way, not exactly. What they are actually looking at is an astronomical timing point. And they would have basically like link period where they were waiting to observe the rise before starting the year.
Stefan: [0:26:00] Without the intercalary days?
Steven: [0:26:03] Exactly, intercalary which is what a leap year is intercalation. It’s just a fudging.
Stefan: [0:26:10] Yeah, just adding a little bit of time in.
Steven: [0:26:12] For the Egyptians and the Greeks there was a purpose for it. The intercalary days had a purpose. They were actually just waiting for the time to sync up so that they wouldn’t fall out of period. If you look at Egyptian history their calendar system remains vastly accurate over the thousands of years of their history.
They have far more long than their civilization via using these multiple calendar systems. And they went to the greats and then it seemed a bit lost last for some reason. It’s a really interesting line of evidence. We see how we’ve become somewhat disconnected and confused with what the calendar system really does.
Stefan: [0:26:52] A lot of our cultures didn’t have just one calendar either. I know that a place like Egypt had I think four or five. Places like in North Africa, like the Dogon and the Bambara tribes, have the same amount, some really similar ones to Egypt.
These would be civic calendars. They would be measuring the rotation, the orbital period of different planets, obviously, the seasonal calendars. So there’d be all these different systems in place just to keep reminding people of all these things. There was just an obsession with the skies and the motions of the planets. And they had these really ingenious ways of understanding and notating those.
Steven: [0:27:34] Yeah, it’s fascinating too. And you see these systems all around the world like for instance, they use different number sets. It’s 13 and 20 and 30 and 28 so there are different ways you can relate these different cycles. There are many cultures that use that number series, isn’t there?
Stefan: [0:27:58] Yeah, so the Gregorian calendar uses a ratio of 12 to 60 for our calendar system which is 12 hours. Sorry, it’s just a multiple. It’s 24 hours over 360 degrees of a circle. I think. I’m not too sure. We are going to go into that.
Steven: [0:28:20] There’s a lot into that, it’s true.
Stefan: [0:28:21] Yeah but a lot of our coaches instead of using multiples of 12 and 60 for their timekeeping systems they’d use 13 and 20 or 13 and 28 which relate to all sorts of different things, but primarily to musical scales and the harmonics that naturally form in sound and light and things like that which is a very fascinating idea, something I don’t quite understand yet but we will definitely get into it.
Steven: [0:28:50] It does go into an interesting area with the numbering systems what they actually relate to. 13 I think relates to the lunar cycles of the year so the months and then 20 or 28 depending, I think 13-20 it’s very important in the Mayan calendar and that equates to 260 days which also equates to the human gestation period which is pretty crazy. And then you go into the details of the Mayan calendar. There are many, many.
Stefan: [0:29:19] Yeah, I think every time I come to you, I ask you about a new book on the Mayan calendar.
Steven: [0:29:22] I’m obsessed with the Mayan calendar. We interviewed a descendant of a Mayan, a Sharman. I’m going to Tulum in May, which is going to be great. But I feel that the Mayans were masters of their calendar system and they were mathematicians.
They calculated periods far longer which is really where this is going. There’s a lot more you can find out with calendars if you really go into what was happening. 2012, the whole idea that the world was ending then due to the Mayan calendar, that was just the end of a very, very long cycle.
We are going to go into what that is about. When you look through the evidence and you really pin through, it’s very lost but it looks like they were measuring an astronomical phenomenon, which is just fascinating.
Stefan: [0:30:18] Yeah. It really still blows my mind thinking about these old cultures having the ability to measure distances of time so far away but also astronomical bodies that weren’t discovered in modern times until the 1800s, the 1900s.
There are these ancient cultures talking about the size of these objects, the orbital periods and there are just all these occurrences of this and it was so important to them. They were really obsessed with understanding everything that was going on in the sky, in the heavens.
Steven: [0:30:53] Yeah, they seem to understand that there was a purpose to or use for recognizing but when you think about it in its essence, the purpose of the calendar, as we said, is to measure time so that’s what they were doing. So they were just doing it accurately, instead of being somewhat lazy like we are.
We’ve lost even trying to explain the calendar system let alone trying to do it accurately. And it’s a lot of work too. It’s complicated. When you have a look at it we’ve only just scraped the surface of a numbering. You see how they made the Gregorian calendar, it is quite complicated.
But it gets far deeper when you are calculating nine cycles in the nine Mayan calendars and then the largest of it all clicking together. In the 13-28 cycle which is used in China, Polynesia, the Middle East, as well. There’s a lot more going on than just us, the earth revolving around the sun too.
It also fits into the Dynamical Universe discovery that we are in a moving system, the Milky Way that has many motions. And it seems very kind of limited as well just to be basing our ideas on our little planet’s rotation around the sun when really there’s a hell of a lot going on. We know that that’s astronomically happening now.
Stefan: [0:32:26] Yeah. I, for one, feel a very big disconnect from that. I’ve only sort of been noticing it and understanding that there is more going on by looking into the calendar systems and looking into what these ancient cultures were doing, and what they were talking about and what they were measuring because where I live in Sydney you can’t see the stars.
You can maybe if you go south or north an hour or two but you could live your whole life forgetting that you are part of something, like all these big amazing bodies and astronomical phenomenon going on just right above your head.
These are cultures that were living out there observing it every night. You can see why it was so important to them and how they would want to understand that and relate that to them to themselves and their cultures and keep a record of it all.
Steven: [0:33:28] One thing I’ve been trying to do is to start observing the stars. I’m just in the process of buying a telescope.
Stefan: [0:33:37] Really?
Steven: [0:33:39] Yeah. Get a good one. But it’s important. But something I can do now I never knew this, but you can observe the planets. You can pick them out and you can see Mars, and see Venus, the morning star and there are many me references to this in ancient culture.
There’s a lot of information there. You can calculate their cycles. I feel this is moving towards almost a Copernican or Galileo level of understanding where before we thought the earth was the centre of the universe and everything revolved around us.
It took hundreds of years for the idea that we revolve around the sun to really kick into acceptance. But that the big thing of that is the next stage going to be understanding what our motions are within the larger cycles, the other planets, the other stars in our galaxy, the other galaxies?
We are learning that in this moving universe, there are many motions that would be affecting us. And so it’s really interesting and it brings a lot of different fields of study together which is what we aim to do here. There’s a lot of researchers doing good, using very modern techniques to show that. That’s the beauty too is that we have great techniques to kind of measure the stars and understand these things too.
Stefan: [0:35:18] Yeah, just touching on that with thinking about being part of bigger motions and larger bodies and thinking once your mind starts wandering out towards the sun and the moon and the solar system and the galaxy and more galaxies and you keep going out and out and out.
And then you come back and just think back to our calendar system and our Gregorian calendar, it feels very disconnected and you feel very isolated from everything else that’s going on.
I think that’s been the biggest thing for me having that sort of shift in perspective of realizing that we are potentially missing out on understanding this whole other side of existence which is going on out there. We just don’t really talk about it because it’s not part of our daily timekeeping system or part of our daily routine or anything. We are completely cut off, I guess.
Steven: [0:36:15] Completely, distances, and real phenomena that we know with reasonable scientific understanding now so you can picture these things in your head. For instance, say you are on the other side of the Milky Way and looking back on the sky at our star which is the sun which is a tiny little planet which you might be able to see via a Doppler shift.
The way we measure planets is via a tiny little fuzz in front of a star. But imagine how silly you would think of people on that planet were thinking they are only measuring their calculation around that sun, how small-minded they would be. And that’s potentially the perspective that people looking at. So I think yeah, that pretty much covered the Gregorian calendar, didn’t it?
Stefan: [0:37:06] Yeah, I think so. It’s a good starting point to dive into these other calendar systems. It kind of gives you a good insight into their mindsets as well and what they valued. It’s a lot of research but it’s been interesting and exciting.
Steven: [0:37:26] Yeah, I always look forward to the calendar stuff. It’s something I’m really drawn to. It’s just fascinating because it makes science and history. There’s going to be lots more of this to come. Perhaps we’ll be designing a new calendar called the [Rusborn] calendar or something along those lines.
Stefan: [0:37:46] I think that would be good. It’s nice having these conversations, and then being able to apply it practically. You can go out on any night if you can see the stars and just observe the motions. It wasn’t until about a year ago that I realized that if you look at a constellation in the night sky two hours later it’s going to have moved and it’ll return to the same spot every night.
But then there are these slight motions that take upwards of 25000, 26000 years that the ancients would talk about and put in their calendar systems as well. So it’s just like it goes deeper and deeper and deeper and we’ll talk about that later but yeah, it’s an exciting topic, for sure.
Steven: [0:38:35] Oh yeah. You can go to any level of complexity which is just mind-boggling. And it all matters. Once you zoom out it goes beyond our planet but all this stuff is affecting us in the universe.
Stefan: [0:38:47] Yeah, well, it’s been a good chat. It’s very early so sorry if we sound a bit strange but we are looking forward to sharing the next few instalments of the calendar systems. I’m going a bit deeper into this topic. It’s really endless and exciting.
Steven: [0:39:11] Thank you for listening to today’s show. For more information, you can read the full transcript, articles and discussion on our website humanoriginproject.com. You can visit us on social media at Human Origin Project on Facebook and The Human Origin Project on Instagram.
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