On a planet without seasons, how would people track years?
On a planet without axial tilt and with a roughly circular orbit, there would be no seasons. The climate on the planet would be, as far as I can tell, exactly the same at any time of year, and the length of days (and thus the position of the sun in the sky) wouldn't change either.
In a circumstance like that, how might the inhabitants track the passage of years? Would they even be able to? The idea of a year is so fundamental to our understanding of time that it seems odd that it might not be detectable, but I can't really think of any other way for a primitive civilization to measure something as basic as a year.
Are there any primitive (say, pre-Rennaisance) methods for measuring a year's length (i.e. the time it takes the planet to circle its star) that aren't based on axial tilt or an eccentric orbit?
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