DID ISRAELITES SPEND FORTY YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS?

The bible says that Israelites spent the duration of forty years in the wilderness when Moses brought them from Egypt. Many historians and thinkers have been arguing whether these peoples really spent forty years traveling from Egypt to Canaan. It has been observed that one can hardly spend 30 days while traveling from Egypt to “Canaan” even if you could be walking one foot.
If the distance from Egypt to Canaan is not long, then maybe the Israel peoples never spent forty years in the wilderness. Some archeologists and Egyptologists have even denied the existence of The Exodus. They have argued that they have never found any evidence to support the bible story that The Exodus ever took place. But if The Exodus occurred, then the years spent in the wilderness were not calculated properly or in those days a complete year did not consist three sixty four days as we have today.
Pope Gregory XIII introduced the modern day Gregorian calendar in 1582. Therefore, it is clear that those peoples were not using the modern day calendar. Maybe the Israelites had their own way of calculating the number of days in a year or month.
It is not even clear whether peoples like Noah or other biblical peoples really lived in this world for a total of nine hundred or so years. Some of the peoples who support the argument say that the flood that occurred during the Noah times was the one changed the lifespan of the ancient and modern day’s man. Before the flood, the lifespan was measured in hundreds of years, after the flood the lifespan was of the modern day’s man. This conundrum has not yet found an answer even today.