The Manias further proposed that this reconstructed elephant bone with twenty-eight marks was the symbolic expression of a lunar calendar, in which each mark represented a single day in the twenty-eight-day lunar cycle. If this is correct, the first seven marks would have represented the seven-day period from the new moon to the waxing half-moon, the next fourteen marks the fourteen-day period from the waxing half-moon through the full moon to the waning half-moon, and the final seven marks the period from the waning half-moon to the following new moon.
