There's a book called "Parenting for Primates" or something like that where a scientist compares how humans care for their babies vs how various monkeys and apes do, it's pretty fascinating.

Lunar months are actually about 29 1/2 days; most ancient lunar calendars that don't correct for the sun use 12 months and come out with 354 days ... which is why Ramadan moves back 11 days every year (purely lunar calendar).

Most ancient calendars do correct for the sun. :) They stick in bonus days in various ways -- whole bonus month every couple years, bonus week somewhere, etc.

Also deadass giveaway that someone is a man who doesn't know much about women and generally lacks curiosity about the world when it doesn't occur to them that a lunar cycle would be of INTENSE INTEREST and OBVIOUS USE to the 50% of humans who menstruate on roughly a lunar cycle.

"Well, I don't need to know the lunar cycle, so I don't see why ANYONE would," u/icelandichorsey harrumpfs to himself, before explaining to the woman unfortunate enough to sit next to him on public transit how science works, actually.

There was a NOVA episode just a few weeks ago that demonstrated exactly how people could do this with very simple tools! (Like, stick in the ground simple.)

The records they were sharing and recreating were from the last 1,000 years, but it's not appreciably different from what Eratosthenes did, and what we assume older calendar-making societies did. And they demonstrated so beautifully exactly how it works, A+++ go watch the show and then plant your own stick in the ground to measure sun things!

It is also, incidentally, pretty bad for the soil to drive fast on top of it -- going faster than 5 mph increases "washboarding" (or "corrugation"). Tires (and the weight of the vehicles on top of them) are TERRIBLE for soil, and a huuuuuuuge amount of research is put into ensuring that tractor tires compact the soil as little as possible. And even with those beautiful soil-protecting tires, if you're going faster than 5 mph, you're damaging the soil no matter what. Even if your tractor COULD go fast, you don't WANT it to.

People have done good explanations of why the colder air is "more clear," but you can also check with your friendly neighborhood amateur astronomer, who will tell you that cold, dry nights are the clearest for stargazing. And that, sadly for us stargazers, the best nights for stars are often the ones where your fingers get too cold to operate the scope. :)

Where I live, when it's around 20-35*, there's always a lot of moisture in the air, and it's usually cloudy. When it's cold, crisp, and clear as a bell, it's usually below 10 degrees; the conditions are AMAZING for stargazing, but my poor fingers freeze within half an hour.

Clear Dark Sky is a Canadian government forecast service that gives a stargazing forecast for North America .. they give good and clear explanations on atmospheric transparency and "seeing." I expect if you peek at the astronomy forecast,you will find your view of the mountains is the most crisp on days when transparency is high. https://www.cleardarksky.com/c/Ottawakey.html

So what you're saying is it's basically exactly the same as Latin and Hebrew?

You are incorrect. People are still writing literature in Latin, updating the language with modern terms, producing newspapers and newscasts in Latin, and so on.

It's still a dead language, but it's in wide and lively use, and well outside the walls of the Vatican.

So, just FYI, that's a very anglo-saxon thing, and other Christian countries/traditions don't mark Easter with eggs and bunnies. (Or they didn't, until international advertising became a thing and English-language holiday traditions kind of conquered some of those holidays completely.)

(Although the Bible does totally use eggs as a symbol of fertility, and even refers to God as a hen brooding over her eggs.) (I cannot remember any rabbit references off the top of my head, but I bet they're there in the Levitical rules about what you're allowed to eat.)

It literally comes from the Jewish luni-solar calendar, in an attempt to keep it concordant with Passover.

But yeah, like basically every calendar in the history of the earth uses either a lunar, luni-olar, or solar cycle. So basically all holidays, events, and occurrences are going to occur based on one of those calendars. That doesn't mean people were stealing holidays from each other, although sometimes they were. It just means that the planet works the same way for everyone, and there are only so many ways to mark time astronomically when you only have naked eye observation.

There's a period of history called the Axial Age, period of about 2500 years when virtually all "modern" religions arose in recognizable form, including Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, Hinduism, Confusionism, Buddhism. (Depending on how you define the time period, Islam occurs either just within it, or just after.) This is also when the great Greek philosophers are writing, and many other intellectual revolutions are taking place, across the globe, seemingly in societies that have no interaction with each other.

Now, there's quite a bit of dispute about whether the "Axial Age" is even real, and if it is, what it might mean.

But the thing that stands out to me about that period of time, and the religions that arise out of it, is that empires had arisen, they became considerably larger, and cities became much bigger as agricultural surplus grew. We don't have a lot of textual evidence for pre-axial indigenous religions. But they seem like they were more concerned with appeasing and pleasing gods/ ancestors/supernatural forces. Whereas the philosophies and religions that arise from the axial age are very concerned (in comparison) with questions of interpersonal ethics, and how supernatural forces etc want us to behave towards our fellow men. It's possible that the rise of the great modern religions that we know today coincided with people having to ask, "how do I live in this city of 100,000 people and not end up with everyone murdered?" instead of "how do I live in this tribe of 1,000 people who are all at least kind-of related to me??"

It also raises an interesting question of whether those great religions of the axial age are now bleeding adherents left and right because they're simply not built to answer the question when it's another couple of orders of magnitude larger -- "how do I live in this dense urban environment of 10 million people, especially when I know that the lifestyle that makes this possible is harming the planet in irreversible ways." The religions that were dominant for the last 2,000 years don't seem to be doing a great job of addressing that -- and even the ones that are seriously trying, a lot of people don't seem to find their answers persuasive. It's possible that you're currently watching the next great shift in philosophical and religious thought, and will get to watch new belief systems arise and rapidly gain large numbers of adherents in real time.

Or maybe not! Check back in 2000 years.