Imagine years coming and going, without being divided into weeks or months as we know them now. Imagine further that the days passed without considering what day it was or even that the days should have names. For many thousands of years, this is how life went. There were only the natural cycles of day & night, and the rudimentary understanding of the seasons: planting time, harvest, winter and thaw.

For many generations, people lived mostly around a campfire for cooking, warmth and to keep predators away. Consequently, many nights were spent gathered around the fire, and this is how tribal stories and cultures were started. They would sit beneath the stars and create stories, imagining that the perpetual heavens above were the home of their gods who brought rain, thunder, good harvests and bad fortune.

They marked the passage of the times of year, and observed that there were certain groupings of stars that were visible only at certain times of year. These groupings became known as the constellations. In the absence of city lights, our galaxy was much more plainly visible then. You can imagine these early people marking out the pattern of overhead stars in the dirt, and then connecting the marks in the dirt to form the rough shape of an animal that they could identify with. It gave them a means of developing and communicating about the cyclical nature of the seasons, and these constellations became the subject of their developing mythology and religions.

The concept of a ‘calendar’ year was driven by developing civilization in this way. In early days, people gathered in their caves and around campfires in clans, and if they were well enough managed, and good hunters, clans grew to become tribes. Tribes of peoples began to gather around ideas and organizational concepts that enabled them to have better assurance of reliable food sources and protection from weather, predator beasts and from other tribes.

Eventually, those in the tribes who took interest in improving their planted harvest realized that there was a period after the thaw that was most ideal for planting seeds. Planted too early, and a late frost would kill the seedling. Too late, and the harvest would be threatened by encroaching autumn, with accompanying frosts and unpredictable early snows. This became the motivation to attempt to measure the annual year into observable increments in order to predict the ideal time to plant the year’s crops.

We can imagine that these early people began to mark the passing days and cycles of the moon by making glyph marks on rock walls. In time, it became apparent that the moon cycled in regular phases of just under thirty days, and that the annual cycles of the seasons passed in approximately twelve cycles of the moon. These observations of the passing moons and seasons shaped the formation of the early calendar. The calendar evolved for many years, with varying interpretations as religion and our understandings of the planetary motions evolved.

The stories told for generations around the early campfires became myths and legends, and they were shared with other migrating tribes people. One can imagine it occurring for many, many generations in grunts, hand motions and drawings in the dirt. Common words and phrases developed within regions and this obviously permitted better communication, and better development of important survival skills. Tribes would learn what best served other tribes and they would emulate them.

The learned ability to plant and harvest crops, and to tend sheep and goats in fertile river valleys permitted a tribe to settle and to build structures and create a more ordered existence. Rivers served as not only a crucial source of water for drinking, cooking and cleaning, but it also provided for easy transit and transport of goods and food. Trading developed between tribes, and in time, this exchange of goods and knowledge, in combination with reliable harvests permitted specialization of skills. Consequently, specialization of skills is what permitted acceleration of early development of rudimentary tools and weapons.

Culture and civilization would develop like this over many, many years, building on the tools, strategies and resources that enabled optimum survivability. The knowledge, myths, beliefs, wisdom and stories passed from generation to generation. They were communicated in petroglyphs and pictographs on cave walls and in song. And in time recorded in marks written with plant dye onto dried sheepskin. Language expanded as necessary to describe their growing understanding of the world around them.

I have always been fascinated by this effort of early people to leave their marks on cave walls, so that their story may endure for many generations after their death. I am also continually in awe of early people who were somehow able to carve temples out of a solid rock, and to build mammoth pyramids with bronze-age tools. In some epochs and in some areas of the world, civilizations have vanished, leaving amazing hieroglyphs, statues and monuments. In many cases, we are not capable of explaining their accomplishments even now, or replicating them with our modern technologies and heavy equipment.

We cannot help but be astonished by their accomplishments many of which have stood for thousands of years. I have traveled all over the world to walk in their footsteps and to appreciate first-hand their contributions to the mystery and the progress of humanity on our planet.

Some of my best memories were of times sitting around a campfire with my parents and my brothers, and later with my own children. It became a family tradition for us, and I hope that you can experience this with your family as often as possible and think about all of the millions of family campfires before you, and wonder about their conversations and dreams. And someday, I hope you can share it with your own families.

Music credit: Nicholas Gunn