Mechanical clocks date back 700 years so it wouldn't have been a weird thing to explain, but clocks aside, it would already have been known that sundials aren't accurate, humans have been observing the seasons and positions of the sun for thousands of years. For the purposes they used it for, it would have been good enough.
Yeah, it does take you into a "what does time mean" rabbit hole. The sun is highly consistent, but that's not the same as convenient - we prefer to divide time into equal units, and leave the rotations of the earth to the International Earth Rotation Service.
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Only vaguely related to the article, but I really enjoy the notion that the sun is a bad clock - like, that the time a sundial tells is unreliable.
It doesn’t match the other clock we made, sure, but boy that would’ve been a weird thing to explain to any human at all 200 years ago.
Mechanical clocks date back 700 years so it wouldn't have been a weird thing to explain, but clocks aside, it would already have been known that sundials aren't accurate, humans have been observing the seasons and positions of the sun for thousands of years. For the purposes they used it for, it would have been good enough.
Yeah, it does take you into a "what does time mean" rabbit hole. The sun is highly consistent, but that's not the same as convenient - we prefer to divide time into equal units, and leave the rotations of the earth to the International Earth Rotation Service.