[Aztlan] Ancient calendars

[Sam Edgerton]

Sid y otros listeros:  In his elegant book, THE ROOTS OF CIVILIZATION 
(McGrew/Hill, New York, 1972), Alexander Marshak, applying NASA 
photo-technology for imaging details on distant astronomical bodies to the 
hundreds of carved antler bones found in  the ancient Paleolithic caves of 
southern France and Northern Spain, revealed that these 40,000 +/- year old 
artifacts, each about a foot long and often with a hole drilled in one end, 
were covered with rows of parallel cuts, almost obscured by time but 
revealed under photo magnification as man made. Some bones even had tiny 
teeth indented along the edges. In studying a great number of these Marshak 
realized that the cuts or teeth were almost always in tight rows of 
twenty-nine or thirty, or separated by smaller cuts numbering four or six - 
in other words remarkably recording the daily changes in the moon from new 
to full to new again both waxing and waning phases. Apparently they were 
suspended from the belts of Cro-Magnon hunters who used them to check when 
the caribou might be returning (or when to impregnate their wives). Could 
these be the world's earliest hanging calendars?  And might there be 
similar artifacts in Neolithic America?
Sam Edgerton

http://lanfiles.williams.edu/~sedgerto/MARSHAK.jpg