KEY IDEAS
ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF
THE HUMAN UNDERSTANDING OF TIME (HUT)

An overview of Rick Doble's theory
about the development of time concepts by humans

with specific points highlighted.

"Father Time: Time personified especially as a bearded old man
holding a scythe and an hourglass" (and often with wings because 'time flies').
This mythical character probably evolved from
the Greek god of time, Cronus, and the Roman god, Saturn.
(Quotation from: Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary)

Let's "cut to the chase" as they say in filmmaking. Here are some big ideas which taken together map out how our sense of time may have evolved according to my ideas and why it is important. I have written in-depth about most of these but I will go into much more detail in future blogs. For now, these will give you an overview.

Later you might want to read some of my many (over 100) articles about the Human Understanding of Time (HUT).

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/

Download PDF's at:

https://unc.academia.edu/RickDoble/Drafts

Why is this important?

I believe that we became the dominant species on the planet because we learned to manage time and to work with time. We are the only animal that does this in a pervasive way. Our understanding of past, present, future, and duration allowed us to take control of our environment. Our shared cultural sense of time is critical when it comes to creating, planning, building, and being civilized.

But a different sense of time may be important in the future. Climate change requires that we consider the future consequences of our technology and also that we plan and respond to changes with both long-term and short-term technology and behavior.

GENERAL OVERVIEW

Studies agree that all animals, except us, live with an immediate sense of time. But our species slowly evolved a linear sense of time with a past, present, future, and duration. This may have taken a million or millions of years to evolve and probably went through several stages.

"It must have required enormous effort
for man to overcome his natural tendency
to live like the animals in a continual present. "

Whitrow, Gerald James. Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press. 1988, page 22.

SPECIFIC POINTS

#1. Our sense of time developed due to our increasingly larger brains and our early cognitive thinking that included an ability to consider different future moves (i.e., the part of our brain that allowed this is the pre-frontal cortex; our particular kind is unique to Homo sapiens).

My most popular article:

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2014/08/animal-senses-compared-to-human-sense.html

MRI head side.

#2. Our large brains had the ability to remember past experiences in detail and recall those memories at will.

"Man must have been conscious of memories and purposes long before he made any explicit distinction between past, present, and future."

Whitrow, Gerald. Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press. 1988, pages 21-22.

#3. Being able to remember in detail, recalling something that no longer exists, is also related to thinking about the future and imagination in which a time that does not yet exist is imagined.

Our ability to remember and have memories is due to our large brain.
Our understanding of time past, present, and future is closely tied to this ability.

#4. Our sense of time is related to language which always includes a time reference.

-------------------

"Time reference is a universal property of language..."

Lecarme, Jacqueline, Ph.D. Linguistics. "Nominal Tense and Tense Theory." Academia.edu, 1998.

#5. Language and shared words, concepts, and images are the tools for working with and managing time. The concepts must be shared so that a group can plan, coordinate, and work together.

#6. There could be quite different ways to conceive of time and to deal with and work with time in a culture even when the Homo sapiens brain had fully developed.

#7. Our sense of time, our concepts and our understanding of time are shaped by our cultures.

#8. I have suggested that at one stage a sense of time was almost immediate. Thinking about time is limited to about 3-5 days in a contemporary hunter-gatherer Amazon tribe, the Piraha, for example. There may have been an even earlier stage when time was more immediate. It is likely that this immediacy was the sense of time that early humans, who lived as hunter-gatherers, adhered to throughout the Paleolithic era. This idea is supported by studies of contemporary hunter-gatherers. It appears that their sense of time is primarily immediate. For example, they eat food when they find it and do not save food for later, even though they could.

One of my most popular articles:

https://deconstructingtime.blogspot.com/2018/10/everett-how-language-began-and-human-time-keeping.html

TOP: The passageway (bottom) and roof-box (top) at Newgrange, the Neolithic passage tomb in Ireland. The roof-box was built to indicate when the winter solstice occurred by only allowing light through the roof-box during the period of the solstice.

BOTTOM: A diagram showing how the winter solstice shaft of light illuminated the passageway and confirmed that the time period was that of the winter solstice.

#9. When the switch to agriculture occurred in the Neolithic era, the sense of time became linear meaning that past, present, future and duration were the way they thought about time. Planting required long-term planning from season to season and year to year. Numerous Neolithic structures were built that could indicate the time of year with some precision. These structures provide clear evidence for the importance of linear time to these cultures.

#10. For young children time is immediate. Then they go through various stages in their understanding of time as they grow but they are also constantly shaped and molded to understand time according to the concepts of their culture.

-------------------

"Unfortunately, we are not very well informed in the psychology of primitive man, but there are children all around us, and it is in studying children that we have the best chance of studying the development of logical knowledge, physical knowledge, and so forth."

Piaget, Jean. "Genetic Epistemology." Columbia Forum, (1969), 12, 4.

An intricate carefully woven Weaverbird nest. Early hominins and Weaverbirds often lived in close proximity to each other in Baobab trees, so early humans would have been aware of their nests and how the nests were built.

#11. I have suggested that an important technology, woven-fiber technology (basket weaving), may have begun early in our evolution, as early as a million or so years ago. Weaverbird nests and other bird nests may have provided an early model. This is related to time because imagining a basket design, gathering materials and planning, then making the basket with strands and spokes may have been an important component to our developing sense of time.

Based on insights from ethnoarchaeology, it appears that everyone in a tribe, men, women, and children, knew how to weave baskets and many other items as well. And, as I have written, baskets are tools.

-------------------

"Relatively few tribes of American Indians understood pottery, except in the crudest form. As for basketry, it may be said that every Indian from the land of the Esquimaux down through Mexico was a basket weaver."

Huckel, John Frederick & Harvey, Fred. American Indians : first families of the Southwest. Fred Harvey publisher, 1920.

https://archive.org/details/cu31924028656738/page/n59/mode/1up?view=theater

#12. A finished basket could have been a model for time and time duration as it is clear from the strands and the spokes how it was made and how much time it took to make it.

Reed construction (woven-fiber technology) of a wide variety of boats, houses, and industrial and everyday items reached a high point in Mesopotamia. This picture of a reed boat, that can carry 20 people, is from the contemporary culture of Uros in South America showing what was possible with reeds.

#13. During the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Ancient eras woven-fiber technology continued to be developed and became a sophisticated industry. In Mesopotamia most cities were served by fleets of reed boats, large and small, some even sea-going. Small houses and large community buildings were made entirely out of reeds. The Babylonian model of the night sky, as it rotated and was divided into minutes and seconds, may have been derived from a reed basket design, as baskets were a key product in that culture. Today we still use their concepts of minutes and seconds along with their mathematics.

#14. Familiar with Babylonian star charts and planet data, the Greek astronomer Ptolemy devised a geocentric (Earth-centered) geometry of the universe. This system was so accurate its calendar was off by only one day every one hundred years.

"Astronomical clock (dating from 1520)

at the town hall of Ulm/Germany" (Wikimedia)

#15. Although Ptolemy's geocentric view of the universe was dismissed when Copernicus's heliocentric system (sun-centered) was eventually accepted, many complex Medieval clocks were built in Europe, based on the gearing of Ptolemy's system, hundreds of years before the heliocentric system was accepted.

LEFT: A simplified drawing showing how Ptolemy used perfect circles within perfect circles (called epicycles) to achieve a high level of accuracy.

RIGHT: A modern clock showing the circular gearing. Ptolemy's geometry of circles within circles became central to clocks and the Industrial Revolution, even though his astronomy was no longer accepted.

#16. The sophisticated gearing of these clocks based on Ptolemy's geometry led directly to the invention of machines and the modern industrial age.

-------------------

"The clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the modern industrial age."

Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934, Ch. 1, sct. 2.

#17. Today, the immediate benefits of our technology are creating far-reaching problems in the future. This has caused the crisis with climate change. We need a new sense of time that includes the consequences of our actions and our technology if we want to avoid damaging the environment.