Before mechanical clocks and printed calendars, farmers read the world itself: the return of certain birds, the angle of autumn light, the behavior of animals before a storm. This was not superstition but accumulated observation — a science that required no laboratory because the landscape was the laboratory, and the experiment had been running for generations. Nasreddin learned from farmers because their knowledge had been tested against the hardest criterion available: whether the harvest came or didn't.
Each step builds on the last.