I never really understood why so many cultures and peoples wouldn’t just track moons and sun cycles separately?
The moon is easy, because you can see it waxing and waning with your own eyes every day, and most people can scratch off 14 days in their head without keeping strict track.
The solar year is much harder to keep track. Seasons change unpredictably, and if you live a stable life and your not nomadic or a sailor, you can see where the sun rises and sets using familiar landmarks. Even better to use a sun dial, the more accurate the taller and pointier it is. It just doesn’t work in bad weather, but who doesn’t have sunshine at least ever couple of days.
I guess the sense of need comes in when people want to assign moon phases to the year phases and have them both mean the same thing every year. It’s fine to schedule something 3 moons from now, or 2 years from now, but doesn’t work to tell someone that you’ll meet them 1 year and two moons from now. That would be differently interpreted than 15 moons and you’d be off by as much as those 8 days.
That is an oddity. I mean, that’s what the Mayans did, and they calculated the sync cycles in order to help the New Agers thousands of years in the future. :^) Others do it, insofar as the Hebrew calendar is primarily lunar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_calendar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_calendar