Precise modern time is important to you, as you don't want to be late for your dinner party. Or rather you want to be fashionably late.
Nope. The people putting on the dinner party will tell me Tuesday 15th November using their Gregorian year-planner -- the one we've all been using since 1752, adding a day here and there but just adding 365 to the previous year.
Linear Christian time is important to Christians as they peg their history according to an imagined date of when Christ was born. History is important as.........
Nope. They use the Julian and then the Gregorian calendar, adding a day here and there but just adding 365 to the previous year.
It's important to decide which cyclical tasks to complete and when during the Mesolithic. Your survival depends on it?
Nope. If they used a calendar they would not survive very long since (say) planting or reaping crops or (say) when the reindeer herd are due to return varies year by year and is to be calculated by observation.
The modern calendar would be of no practical use in the Mesolithic, the flora and fauna refused to conform to the strict linear rigors of the modern christian calendar, so the ancients sensibly adopted a more practical cyclical approach(?) .
Nope. They did what they had to do when they had to do it. Why are cycles even in anybody's mind? Presumably they noticed that seasons recur in a pattern but whether they thought of it as a 'cycle' is unknown. It's the end of the football season. Do I think of it as a cycle? Nope, just that time of the year.
