Holocene calendar
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The Holocene calendar is a proposal for a calendar reform which aims to solve a number of problems with the current Gregorian Calendar. It sets the start of the current era to 10,000 BCE. It was originally proposed by Cesare Emiliani. [1]
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[edit] Motivation
Some of the problems with the Gregorian Calendar, which currently serves as the commonly accepted world calendar, include:
- The Gregorian Calendar starts at the presumed year of the birth of Jesus Christ. This Christian aspect of the Gregorian calendar (especially the use of Before Christ and Anno Domini) can be irritating, or even offensive, to non-Christian people.[2]
- Biblical scholarship is virtually unanimous that the birth of Jesus Christ was actually a few years prior to AD 1. This makes the calendar inaccurate insofar as Christian dates are concerned.
- There is no year zero as 1 BC is followed immediately by AD 1.
- BC years count down when moving from past to future, thus 44 BC is after 250 BC. This makes calculating date ranges in the Holocene era across the BC/AD boundary more complicated than in the HE.
Instead, the Holocene calendar sets the start, the epoch, of the current era to 10,000 BC. This is a first approximation of the start of the current geologic epoch, not coincidentally called the Holocene (the name means entirely recent). The motivation for this is that human civilization (e.g., the first settlements, agriculture, etc.) is believed to have arisen around this time. All key dates in human history can then be listed using a simple increasing date scale with smaller dates always occurring before larger dates.
[edit] Conversion
Conversion to Holocene from Gregorian AD (CE) dates can be achieved by adding 10,000. BC (BCE) dates are converted by subtracting the BC year from 10,001.
For example:
10002 BC ........ -1 HE
10001 BC ......... 0 HE
10000 BC ......... 1 HE
1 BC ..... 10000 HE
AD 1 ........ 10001 HE
AD 2007 ........ 12007 HE
AD 10000 ........ 20000 HE
[edit] Comparison
Some other calendar systems also appear to meet the goals of the Holocene calendar system.
- The Jōmon Era (JE) is a Japanese proposal to supplant the current use of regnal years.
- The Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) date system aims to bypass the Christian connotations of the BC/AD term (Before Christ/Anno Domini), while conveniently using the same numerical years.
[edit] References
- David Ewing Duncan (1999). The Calendar, 331–332. ISBN 1-85702-979-8.
