
Ever wondered why we brush our teeth or why toilets flush? Greg Jenner's global journey through history reveals how our mundane Saturday rituals connect us to ancient Babylon and challenge the myth of linear human progress - making the ordinary extraordinary.
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The piercing sound of your alarm clock isn't just interrupting your sleep-it's connecting you to thousands of years of human ingenuity. That precise 7:00 AM wake-up call represents millennia of trial, error, and cultural compromise. What feels natural and universal-seconds ticking into minutes, minutes into hours-is actually an agreed-upon fiction developed through countless experiments across civilizations. Consider this: the word "day" itself creates confusion. English awkwardly uses one term for both sunlight hours and the full 24-hour cycle, while Dutch sensibly employs "Dag" for daylight and "Etmaal" for the complete rotation. Romans tried fixing this mess when Censorinus proposed "civil day" for 24 hours and "natural day" for sunlight, but seventh-century scholars reversed these definitions, leaving us with terminological chaos that persists in academic writing today. Our midnight-to-midnight day? That's ancient Egypt's doing. While Babylonians started their day at dusk and medieval Italians followed suit, we inherited the Egyptian practice of splitting existence into two 12-hour blocks. Even more remarkable: a 30,000-year-old eagle bone from France's Dordogne region bears notches tracking the moon's 14-day waxing cycle-possibly humanity's oldest calendar, proving our ancestors were obsessed with measuring time long before civilization emerged.