An artists impression of a fire burning in one of the Mesolithic lunar calendar pits.
Archaeologists believe they have discovered the world’s oldest “calendar” in a field in Scotland.
New analysis of a group of 12 pits excavated in Aberdeenshire shows they appear to mimic the phases of the moon to track lunar months over the course of a year.
Until now the first formal time-measuring devices were thought to have been created in Mesopotamia about 5,000 years ago.
But the pit alignment near Crathes Castle predates those discoveries by thousands of years, experts say.
The Mesolithic monument at Warren Field is said to have been created by hunter-gatherer societies nearly 10,000 years ago.
It was excavated between 2004-06 and recently analysed by a team led by Birmingham University.
The pit site was discovered when unusual crop markings were noticed during an aerial survey.
