eli5: when and how did humans first recognize the concept of “time”

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eli5: when and how did humans first recognize the concept of “time”

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2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

there isn’t going to be any singular, satisfying answer for this because it wasn’t really a philosophical invention in the same way that, say, the number zero was ‘invented’. Humans have had some concept of time for as long as we’ve been a species, because experiencing time isn’t unique to humans. Our primate ancestors experienced time, and so do elephants and dogs and goldfish, and all have some internal mental processes related to that. Whether this meets your definition of a “concept of time”, is really a question about how you’re choosing to define that.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I figure as we became more sentient and conscious of ourselves, we likely noticed it small things at first, for example, fruit rotting and becoming less desirable to consume in just a couple of days and within a week becoming in edible, then we probably started to grasp other concepts about how we change “age” given enough time.