What did early humans notice about shadows during the course of a day?

Question

What did early humans notice about shadows during the course of a day?

Answer 1

  That they started long go short then got long again then disappeared.

Answer 2

They lived on a flat Earth with a Sun that moved around a stationary Earth.

Answer 3

It depends on how early you go.  The earliest humans noticed that their bodies cast a shadow.

These same humans probably later realized that the shadow was always on the opposite side of the sun of the object casting it, and perhaps they concluded that the blocking of light was involved with shadow casting.

Ancient civilizations (Egyptian, Mayan, etc) seemed to have a greater understanding of shadows.  And were able to create timekeeping devices, based on the earth/sun relationship throughout the day.  Some of these civilizations were even able to roughly accurately calculate that the earth was a sphere, and what it's diameter was.  They did this based on knowing the distance between two citites, the length of time between "noon" in these citites, and using triangulation mathematics based on shadow casting from these two various cities.

The answer I think you are trying to get, though:

Through the course of one day, however, I suppose all that would be noticed was that the shadow is much much longer at sunrise and sunset, and much much shorter at midday (in fact, if you lived between the tropical lines, there would be at least one day a year where you would cast NO shadow at midday, seeing how the sun was directly overhead, your shadow would be directly below you).

Answer 4

The weird thing about prehistory is that we have no record of it.