The World’s Oldest Calendar By Brian Simpson

Archaeology has been, since the post-World War II period, biased against seeing the Northern European people in pre-history as having made any significant scientific advances at all. They were savages compared to the enlightened south. But that bigotry was always a problem, given that Stonehenge was constructed as an astronomical observatory, and the massive megaliths were moved about 180 miles from the origin site to where the stones are today. Without modern machinery this was a great feat of primitive engineering and man power, so much so that popular books like Erich Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods? (1968), hypothesised that it was the work of an extra-terrestrial civilisation! Why such an advanced civilisation would bother moving rocks, rather than introduce the people to high tech, is a mystery.

          This story dates back a few years, but is worth repeating. The world’s oldest calendar was found in a field at Crathes Castle in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

The calendar consists of 12 pits which model the phase of the moon and tracks lunar months. They date from 8,000 BCE. What is also significant, is that the site is aligned on the Midwinter sunrise, also supporting the hypothesis of the site being a calendar. It was possible to correct for the seasonal drift of the lunar year, which the Nordics at the time achieved 5,000 years before this was done in the Middle East. Source: Endeavour, October, 2013, p. 9.

          Professor Vince Gaffney analysed the site in a paper in Internet Archaeology:

https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue34/gaffney_index.html