Holocene calendar

The Holocene calendar, also known as the Holocene Era (HE) or Human era, is a year numbering system that adds exactly 10,000 years to the currently world-dominant AD or CE era system, placing its first year near the beginning of the Holocene epoch and the Neolithic revolution, making the current year 12016 HE. The Human Era was first proposed by the scientist Cesare Emiliani in 1993.^[1][2][3]

Motivation

Cesare Emiliani's proposal for a calendar reform sought to solve a number of alleged problems with the current Anno Domini era, which number the years of the commonly accepted world calendar. These issues include:

• The Anno Domini era is based on an erroneous estimation of the birth year of Jesus. The era places Jesus' birth year in 1 BC, but modern scholars have determined that he was born in or before 4 BC. Emiliani argues that replacing it with the approximate beginning of the Holocene era makes sense.
• The birth of Jesus is a less universally relevant epoch event than the approximate beginning of the Holocene era.
• The years BC are counted down when moving from past to future, making calculation of timespans difficult.
• The Anno Domini era has no year zero, with 1 BC followed immediately by AD 1, complicating the calculation of timespans further.

Instead, HE places its epoch to 10,000 BC. This is a rough approximation of the start of the current geologic epoch, 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 within this time.

Benefits

Human Era proponents claim that it makes for easier geological, archaeological, dendrochronological and historical dating, as well as that it bases its epoch on an event more universally relevant than the birth of Jesus. All key dates in human history can then be listed using a simple increasing date scale with smaller dates always occurring before larger dates. Another gain is that the Holocene Era starts before the other Calendar Eras. So it could be useful for the comparison and conversion of dates from different calendars.

Conversion

Conversion from Julian or Gregorian AD years to the Human Era can be achieved by adding 10,000 to the AD year. The current year of AD 2016 can be transformed into a Holocene year by adding the digit "1" before it, making it 12016 HE. BC years are converted by subtracting the BC year from 10,001. A useful validity check is that the last single digits of BC and HE equivalent pairs must add up to 1 or 11.

References

• David Ewing Duncan (1999). The Calendar. pp. 331–332. ISBN 1-85702-979-8. 
• Duncan Steel (2000). Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar. John Wiley and Sons. pp. 149–151. ISBN 978-0-471-29827-4. 
• Günther A. Wagner (1998). Age Determination of Young Rocks and Artifacts: Physical and Chemical Clocks in Quaternary Geology and Archeology. Springer. p. 48. ISBN 978-3-540-63436-2. 

External links

• "News and comment", Geology Today, 20/3 (2004) 89–96.
• Timeline of World History
• Geologic TimeScale Foundation: GSSP Table, engineering.purdue.edu
• Comparison of some historic dates in the gregorian and the Holocene calendar
• Article about the Holocene calendar