Stone Age drawings showed Lunar calendar?

[Swank]

Does the paper deal with the fact that a (synodic) lunar calendar does not align with the solar calendar? One lunar month is about 29.5 days, times 12 makes 354 days. Not 365. So each new year your calendar is somewhat off when you start 'counting moons'.
Every year the start of spring can vary, let's say 14 days. So, combined it all adds up to a rather dubious system for keeping track of your hunting schedule.

It would be close enough for year to year use, just not multi year use. Or to align with a solstice.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

I've been researching all this recently for a book. My feeling is that lunar+solar calendars are recent in comparison with the length of Ice Age human existence, e.g. Warren Field, which is about 8000BC. Hunter-gatherers (really, we should be calling them gatherer-hunters, as the former food source for the vast majority of prehistoric peoples is much more important) would certainly have recognised the Moon as a celestial timekeeper. They wouldn't particularly have needed to know about equinoxes, but they did need a general comprehension of natural history, into which midwinter, midsummer etc would have fed.
If you look for instance at the Lascaux cave paintings, the three main species depicted, aurochs bull, deer and horse, are all depicted how they appear in their mating season. So there would have been generalised connections in their minds, passed on orally down the generations, between natural events and themselves.

Off the original topic -- Inspired by @Stephen Palmer's comment.

When I first read that "Hunter/gatherers" were better described as gardeners years ago it blew my mind. That hunter/gatherers were familiar with each plant within their range, what its uses were, when it would produce etc., and then take efforts to promote the growth and expansion of the plants they wanted to grow, was a worldview changer for me. And then obvious. Early people weren't simply wandering around hoping to find plants. They were promoting the growth of specific plants in specific areas within their "range" in order to assure that they always had the plant resources they needed. To the extent they wandered around it was to follow the animals who wandered around.

Of course the question becomes the distinction between "gardeners" and "farmers" which is naturally up for debate but usually ends with a discussion of time investment and crop type and crop storage. Also the types of communities comes into play. By the time people were sowing, harvesting, and storing grain they were definitely farmers.

Here is a recent article from 2021.

Neanderthals, the Original Gardeners, Intentionally Altered the Landscape as Much as 125,000 Years Ago​

 

[Yozh]

So...I dug out the paper I was looking for. It shows convincing evidence that Palaeolithic people were able to plot the solstices and equinoxes. Basically, the orientation of cave entrances align with the rising and setting of the sun at those times - or at least those examined in France. It seems that this is restricted to caves that were decorated (non-decorated caves do not show alignment) which the author claims were uninhabited - so they held some sort of special significance.

This does not disprove the theory in the paper in the original post of course, but to my mind it does put some doubt on the bonne saison reference point.

And after a bit of hunting around on the interweb, I found the paper: https://www.ccsp.it/web/INFOCCSP/VCS storico/vcs2007pdf/Jègues-Wolkiewiez.pdf

I wonder if the "zero point" for these stone age calendar was a locally observable solar marker that has been lost to time. We have a group of people gathering/hunting/gardening in a relatively small geographic area, probably using the same caves or hollows for winter shelter every year. Their "zero point" will be something like "the first day that sun hits the ledge in front of the spruce tree cave." It's the same (solar calendar) day every year although they don't *really* know that, but it's not a day like the equinox or solstice that means anything to outsiders. It's just noticible to this particular tribe, and they know that regardless of day to day weather the shortening shadows mean that spring is on its way and they should start preparing. Patterns of light and shadow through the year are very important for people relying on the warmth and light of the sun, and easily observed and measured.

Perhaps neighboring tribes all had their own "zero point" for the solar year until increased social complexity and commerce made a universal "zero point" like a solstice more useful.

 

[Wayne Mack]

Does the paper deal with the fact that a (synodic) lunar calendar does not align with the solar calendar? One lunar month is about 29.5 days, times 12 makes 354 days. Not 365. So each new year your calendar is somewhat off when you start 'counting moons'.
Every year the start of spring can vary, let's say 14 days. So, combined it all adds up to a rather dubious system for keeping track of your hunting schedule.

The paper addresses this as follows:

The problem with lunar calendars is that there are about 12.37 lunar months in a solar year. This incompatibility between the lengths of the solar year and the lunar month was of great concern in the classical world, where complicated systems were devised to overcome this problem, for example, using the 19-year cycle of the Moon, but we do not believe that any of these systems were plausible or necessary in the Palaeolithic world. We adopt the simple solution that they started counting months at the start of the bonne saison and continued until counting became irrelevant in late winter—simply re-starting the count of months at the start of the next bonne saison. A great advantage of this calendar is that it is stable in describing the life-cycles of animals and plants despite great geographical and cultural differences in the European Upper Palaeolithic.​

 

[Swank]

The paper addresses this as follows:

The problem with lunar calendars is that there are about 12.37 lunar months in a solar year. This incompatibility between the lengths of the solar year and the lunar month was of great concern in the classical world, where complicated systems were devised to overcome this problem, for example, using the 19-year cycle of the Moon, but we do not believe that any of these systems were plausible or necessary in the Palaeolithic world. We adopt the simple solution that they started counting months at the start of the bonne saison and continued until counting became irrelevant in late winter—simply re-starting the count of months at the start of the next bonne saison. A great advantage of this calendar is that it is stable in describing the life-cycles of animals and plants despite great geographical and cultural differences in the European Upper Palaeolithic.​

That's what I've been saying.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

Off the original topic -- Inspired by @Stephen Palmer's comment.

When I first read that "Hunter/gatherers" were better described as gardeners years ago it blew my mind. That hunter/gatherers were familiar with each plant within their range, what its uses were, when it would produce etc., and then take efforts to promote the growth and expansion of the plants they wanted to grow, was a worldview changer for me. And then obvious. Early people weren't simply wandering around hoping to find plants. They were promoting the growth of specific plants in specific areas within their "range" in order to assure that they always had the plant resources they needed. To the extent they wandered around it was to follow the animals who wandered around.

Of course the question becomes the distinction between "gardeners" and "farmers" which is naturally up for debate but usually ends with a discussion of time investment and crop type and crop storage. Also the types of communities comes into play. By the time people were sowing, harvesting, and storing grain they were definitely farmers.

Indeed! Cultivation and agriculture blend into one another, rather than having a defined boundary. There's a really interesting site that shows this perfectly.

Ohalo II site, Israel; Cultivation and Proto-Weeds in Galilee 23,000 years Ago

In this post we present extracts from official publications on the exciting findings from the Ohalo II site in Israel. Evidence shows that cultivation had already begun in the Near East before 23,0…

novoscriptorium.com

 

[Parson]

@Stephen Palmer .... Thanks for the link! That's great stuff.