The oldest layer of Indian astronomy survives because a reviewer quoted it before discarding it. Varāhamihira's 505 CE review preserves the Paitāmaha school: a five-year calendar cycle of 1,830 days, solstice pegged to the asterism Dhaniṣṭhā — a marker that precession dates to roughly 1400–1200 BCE, the era of the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa. Varāhamihira ranks this system "far from the truth," and that verdict is the story: a tradition outgrowing its own oldest science, in writing, without pretending otherwise.