Josh Clark

But just tracking the shadow that the gnomon cast, hopefully just to stick in the ground.

Yeah.

That was early timekeeping.

Oh, man.

I have a thousand jokes I'm just going to walk right past.

At this point.

Good for you, buddy.

You're a pro.

I know.

I'm growing up here at 54.

So that was, yeah, that's what people use for the longest time.

And that eventually, as we'll see, would carry over to things like sundials.

But it's no surprise that China was way ahead of the game as far as timekeeping goes, because the oldest surviving sort of actual thing that we have comes from northern China from an archaeological site that they found dated back to 2300 B.C.

And again, as you'll see, this is a recurring theme like I mentioned.

It wasn't necessarily like, hey, we got to keep the time from day to day.

It's more like let's calculate the seasons or, you know, the things happening up in the sky.

Right.

Because it was snowing in the middle of China and somebody said, what season is it?

And somebody else said, let's find out with this gnomon.

And the other person was like, no, no, pull that out.