Seconds, minutes and hours are based on the joints of the fingers of your hand~60/12 or so I've heard @Weird Tolkienish Figure
How 10 Fingers Became 12 Hours
episode number ED-191
https://www.earthdate.org/how-10-fingers-became-12-hoursWe have 10 fingers, so we’ve based our common counting systems on 10. Why then, do we divide the day into 12 hours and the hour into 60 minutes?
To understand, we need to go back 3000 years. Babylonians also used their hands to count, but wanting to count higher than 10, they devised a different system.
They used their thumb to count the three segments of their four fingers to get 12. They marked that 12 by raising a finger on the other hand. Twelve times five fingers is 60.
2500 years ago, when people started using sundials, it seemed only natural to divide the day in 12.
Egyptian astronomers then found 12 stars to mark the passing of time in the night sky, making a 24-hour cycle.
Early Greek mathematicians realized they could divide a circle into six equilateral triangles like a sliced pizza.
Around 2200 years ago, the first Greek astronomer to describe a round Earth wanted a system to navigate it. He took that 6-part circle and divided each part by 60 to get 360 degrees.
Another Greek divided those degrees further, into 60 minute parts, and those into 60 secondary parts.
A few centuries later, these geographic minutes and seconds were applied to the 24-hour day.
But it would take another thousand years before we could accurately measure that second, which we’ll cover on another EarthDate.
