February 29: What would happen without a Leap Day? It's more than you might think
Alabama at Birmingham. “Christmas will be in summer. There will be no snow.
There will be no feeling of Christmas." WHO CAME UP WITH LEAP YEAR? The short answer: It evolved. Ancient civilizations used the cosmos to plan their lives, and there are calendars dating back to the Bronze Age. They were based on either the phases of the moon or the sun, as various calendars are today.
Usually they were “lunisolar," using both. Now hop on over to the Roman Empire and Julius Caesar. He was dealing with major seasonal drift on calendars used in his neck of the woods.
They dealt badly with drift by adding months. He was also navigating a vast array of calendars starting in a vast array of ways in the vast Roman Empire. He introduced his Julian calendar in 46 BCE.
It was purely solar and counted a year at 365.25 days, so once every four years an extra day was added. Before that, the Romans counted a year at 355 days, at least for a time. But still, under Julius, there was drift.
There were too many leap years! The solar year isn't precisely 365.25 days! It's 365.242 days, said Nick Eakes, an astronomy educator at the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Thomas Palaima, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said adding periods of time to a year to reflect variations in the lunar and solar cycles was done by the ancients. The Athenian calendar, he said, was used in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries with 12 lunar months.
That didn't work for seasonal religious rites. The drift problem led to “intercalating" an extra month periodically to realign with lunar and solar cycles, Palaima said. The Julian calendar was 0.0078 days (11 minutes and 14 seconds) longer
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