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Man's nature has led him to categorize his environment in order to better understand it and organize his activities. Many aspects, as far as our basic needs are concerned, were improved by this simple act of naming and organizing our surroundings.
In our first steps in the world, determining the patterns of nature was an almost mandatory condition for our survival. Day and night, the first simple patterns that any living thing on the planet recognizes.
Many of our ancestors tried to group the days so that, as a whole, they corresponded to the repetition of the solar cycle, that is, the time it takes for the earth to revolve around the sun. Why did they do this? Because it allowed them to better organize their activities, whether for farming or warfare, or any daily activity.
The ancient Egyptians concluded that a year consisted of 365 days and many other civilizations agreed with this estimate. Adding and subtracting days according to their celebrations, rituals and beliefs. However, the math did not add up.
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The Romans were always meticulous about naming, annotating and categorizing events, perhaps inherited from the Greeks. In the first reform of this grouping of days they determined that the year lasted 365 days and 6 hours. These days were organized in the calendar they called Julian, in honor of the emperor Julius Caesar.
The problem with organizing the years based on days is that the days do not correspond exactly with the planet's rotation around the sun. That is why the calculation made by the Romans in their Julian calendar the year was not exactly 365 days but had 6 hours left over.
Let's do the math now. Those 6 hours left over at the end of 4 years will become a day (6 hours left over × 4 years = 24 hours or 1 day). That extra day would produce a serious problem in the Julian calendar. The Romans decided, then, to add an extra day every 4 years to their calendar. This year, to which they added an extra day, was called a leap year. In this way the calendar was not out of date, or so they thought.
The name leap year is due to the fact that it was the shortened way of saying that the sixth day before the first day of the month of March was repeated. In Latin it is said "bis sextus dies ante calendas martii", which derived in leap because who would want to say all that. The calendas were the first days of any month.
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Thus, the day before the beginning of March was to be repeated every four years and the year in which this occurred was to be called a leap year. That was what they stipulated for the Julian calendar because as we already know the rotation of the planet does not agree exactly with the rotation around the sun (365.25 days in that first Roman reform) and if they followed them, they would use a leap year.
After reforms and improvements in the calculations, the Roman calendar was immensely improved. The names of the months were changed. The year did not last 365.25 but 365.2425 days. It went from being Julian to Gregorian. Ten days were added. However, the necessary idea of the leap year endured and was maintained until our current calendar.
Although, undoubtedly, it is a natural human tendency to categorize natural patterns, the Calendar is one of the best tools invented by him and without which our activities and plans or even our human progress would not have been so easy.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
