[al:新概念英语（三）] [ar:MP3 同步字幕版（英音）] [ti:The First Calendar] [by:更多学习内容，请到yingyu.chazidian.com搜索“新概念”] [00:01.43]Lesson 38 [00:03.43]The first calendar [00:12.22]What is the importance of the dots, lines, and symbols engraved on stone, bones and ivory? [00:22.14]Future historians will be in a unique position when they come to record the history of our own times. [00:29.57]They will hardly know which facts to select from the great mass of evidence that steadily accumulates. [00:37.20]What is more, they will not have to rely solely on the written word. [00:42.25]Films, videos, CDs and CD-ROMs are just some of the bewildering amount of information they will have. [00:50.83]They will be able, as it were, to see and hear us in action. [00:55.61]But the historian attempting to reconstruct the distant past is always faced with a difficult task. [01:03.25]He has to deduce what he can from the few scanty clues available. [01:08.60]Even seemingly insignificant remains can shed interesting light on the history of early man. [01:15.47]Up to now, historians have assumed that calendars came into being with the advent of agriculture, [01:22.26]for then man was faced with a real need to understand something about the seasons. [01:28.07]Recent scientific evidence seems to indicate that this assumption is incorrect. [01:34.48]Historians have long been puzzled by dots, lines and symbols [01:39.52]which have been engraved on walls, bones, and the ivory tusks of mammoths. [01:45.64]The nomads who made these markings lived by hunting and fishing during the last Ice Age [01:51.69]which began about 35, 000 B.C.and ended about 10, 000 B.C. [01:58.93]By correlating markings made in various parts of the world, [02:02.97]historians have been able to read this difficult code. [02:07.17]They have found that it is connected with the passage of days and the phases of the moon. [02:13.25]It is, in fact, a primitive type of calendar. [02:17.51]It has long been known that the hunting scenes depicted on walls were not simply a form of artistic expression. [02:25.14]They had a definite meaning, for they were as near as early man could get to writing. [02:31.42]It is possible that there is a definite relation between these paintings and the markings that sometimes accompany them. [02:39.41]It seems that man was making a real effort to understand the seasons 20, 000 years earlier than has been supposed.