Holocene calendar
The Holocene calendar, also known as the Holocene era or Human era (HE), is a year numbering system that adds exactly 10,000 years to the currently world-dominant Anno Domini (AD) and Common Era (CE) system, placing its first year near the beginning of the Holocene epoch and the Neolithic revolution. Holocene calendar proponents claim that it makes for easier geological, archaeological, dendrochronological and historical dating, as well as that it bases its epoch on a more universally relevant event. The current year of 2011 AD can be transformed into a Holocene year by adding the digit "1" before it, making it 12011 HE. The Human Era was first proposed by Cesare Emiliani in 1993 (11993 HE).[1][2][3]
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[edit] Motivation
Cesare Emiliani's proposal for a calendar reform sought to solve a number of claimed problems with the current Anno Domini era, which number the years of the commonly accepted world calendar. These issues include:
- The Anno Domini era (or Common Era) is based on an erroneous estimation of the birth year of Jesus Christ. The era places Jesus' birth year in 1 BC, but modern scholars have determined that he was born in either 6 AD or before 3 BC.
- The approximate birth year of Jesus is seen by some as a less universally-relevant epoch event than the approximate beginning of the Holocene epoch.
- BC years are counted down when moving from past to future, thus 44 BC is after 250 BC
- The Gregorian calendar has no year zero, with 1 BC followed immediately by AD 1, complicating the determination of the interval between years on opposite sides of the BC/AD era marker. Many historical lives and regimes span that marker.
Instead, HE places its epoch or year one of the current era 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 entirely within 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 the Holocene Era from Julian or Gregorian AD years can be achieved by adding 10,000. 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.
| Gregorian years | Holocene Epoch Human Era |
| c.30000 BC | c.-20000 HE or c.20000 BHE |
| 10001 BC | 0 HE |
| 10000 BC | 1 HE |
| 1 BC | 10000 HE |
| AD 1 | 10001 HE |
| AD 2011 | 12011 HE |
| AD 10000 | 20000 HE |
| Events | Julian or Gregorian years |
Holocene Era Human Era |
| End of the Paleolithic Period, All continents (except Antarctica) inhabited, Agriculture and the domestication of animals begins. |
c. 10000 BC | c. 1 HE |
| Earliest walled city (Jericho) | c. 9000 BC | c. 1001 HE |
| Initial Jōmon period begins | c. 7500 BC | c. 2501 HE |
| Approximate start of the 8.2 ka event | c. 6200 BC | c. 3801 HE |
| First copper found in Middle East - beginning of Copper Age | c. 6000 BC | c. 4001 HE |
| Approximated date of possible Black Sea inundation Black Sea deluge theory | c. 5600 BC | c. 4401 HE |
| Approximate start of Northwestern European Neolithic | c.5500 BC | c.4500 HE |
| Julian Day Number 0 | January 1, 4713 BC (from noon UTC) |
5288 HE |
| Day of Creation according to the Ussher chronology | October 23, 4004 BC | 5997 HE |
| Beginning of construction of Passage Graves in Ireland | c. 4000 BC | c. 6000 HE |
| Approximate start of the 5.9 ka event | c. 3900 BC | c. 6101 HE |
| Hebrew calendar's epoch | October 7, 3761 BC | 6240 HE |
| Mayan creation date | August 11, 3114 BC | 6915 HE |
| Narmer or Menes, first Pharaoh of the unified Egypt | c. 3100 BC | c. 6901 HE |
| Beginning of Indus Valley Civilization | c. 3000 BC | c. 7001 HE |
| Probable date of the completion of the first Egyptian pyramid | 2611 BC | 7390 HE |
| Beginning of Xia Dynasty in China | c. 2100 BC | c. 7901 HE |
| Minoan eruption devastates the volcanic island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea | c. 1628 BC | c. 8373 HE |
| Moses leads the Hebrews out of Egypt according to the Old Testament | c. 1255 BC | c. 8746 HE |
| Foundation of Rome, 1 AUC | 753 BC | 9248 HE |
| Cyrus II, king of Anshan and Persia | 559 BC | 9442 HE |
| Death of Alexander; Ptolemy I Soter becomes Pharaoh of Egypt | 323 BC | 9678 HE |
| Empire of Asoka | 273 BC | 9728 HE |
| Imperial China, Qin dynasty | 221 BC | 9780 HE |
| Destruction of Carthage and annexation of the Macedonian Kingdom by the Romans | 146 BC | 9855 HE |
| Cleopatra's suicide and end of Ptolemaic Egypt. | August 12, 30 BC | 9971 HE |
| Augustus becomes the first Emperor of Rome | January 16, 27 BC | 9974 HE |
| Birth of Jesus Christ | 5 BC | 9996 HE |
| Death of Herod the Great | Late March or Early April, 4 BC | 9997 HE |
| Last year of BC era | 1 BC | 10000 HE |
| First year of Anno Domini era | AD 1 | 10001 HE |
| Possible year of Jesus' crucifixion | AD 30 | 10030 HE |
| Migration Period begins, leading to the Fall of Rome | AD 300–476 | 10300–10476 HE |
| Constantine converts to Christianity; defeats Maxentius | AD 312 | 10312 HE |
| Edict of Milan: freedom of cult for the Christians. | AD 313 | 10313 HE |
| Turkic migrations begin | c. AD 500 | c. 10500 HE |
| Muslim conquests begin | AD 632 | 10632 HE |
| The Muslims, under the Umayyad Caliphate, reach the Iberian Peninsula. | AD 711 | 10711 HE |
| Great Zimbabwe built, settlement of L'Anse aux Meadows as first Norse colony in North America | c. AD 1000 | c. 11000 HE |
| Hindu-Arabic numerals introduced to Europe | AD 1202 | 11202 HE |
| Hulagu Khan loses the Battle of Ain Jalut, marking the maximum westward extent of the Mongol Empire | 3 September 1260 | 11260 HE |
| Osman I becomes Sultan of the Ghazi state of Söğüt and establishes the Ottoman Dynasty; | AD 1299 | 11299 HE |
| Black Death reduces Asia and Europe's population by 30% to 60% | AD 1340s | 11340s HE |
| European expansion and colonization begins | AD 1419 | 11419 HE |
| Mehmet II, Sultan of the Ottomans, conquers Constantinople. | AD 1453 | 11453 HE |
| European discovery of the New World | AD 1492 | 11492 HE |
| Vasco da Gama reaches India, by sea, through circumnavigating the African continent | AD 1498 | 11498 HE |
| Brazil is officially discovered and reclaimed by the Portuguese | April 22, AD 1500 | 11500 HE |
| Fall of the Inca Empire | AD 1572 | 11572 HE |
| Gregorian calendar introduced | AD 1582 | 11582 HE |
| The United States of America declares independence from Britain | AD 1776 | 11776 HE |
| Discovery of the planet Uranus | AD 1781 | 11781 HE |
| French Revolution | July 14, AD 1789 | 11789 HE |
| Independence of the Hispanic-American countries | AD 1811–30 | 11811–30 HE |
| Discovery of the planet Neptune | AD 1846 | 11846 HE |
| Second Industrial Revolution | c. AD 1850 | c. 11850 HE |
| End of the Belle Époque; First World War | AD 1914–18 | 11914–18 HE |
| Second World War and nuclear fission | AD 1939–45 | 11939–45 HE |
| Establishment of the United Nations | AD 1945 | 11945 HE |
| Conquest of Mount Everest | AD 1953 | 11953 HE |
| Discovery of DNA genetic code | AD 1953 | 11953 HE |
| First artificial satellite (Sputnik I) | AD 1957 | 11957 HE |
| Yuri Gagarin becomes The first human in space | AD 1961 | 11961 HE |
| First human landing on the Moon | AD 1969 | 11969 HE |
| Universal Time (UTC) replaces Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) | AD 1972 | 11972 HE |
| Pioneer 10 becomes the first space probe to leave the Solar System | AD 1983 | 11983 HE |
| The creation of Wikipedia, the first open edit encyclopedia | AD 2001 | 12001 HE |
| September 11 Terrorist attacks | AD 2001 | 12001 HE |
| Completion of Human Genome Project | AD 2003 | 12003 HE |
| Boxing Day Tsunami | AD 2004 | 12004 HE |
| Current year | AD 2011 | 12011 HE |
[edit] See also
- Before Present
- Calendar Era
- Common Era
- Julian date (JD) – the interval of time in days and fractions of a day since January 1, 4713 BC Greenwich noon, Julian proleptic calendar.
[edit] References
- ^ Cesare Emiliani, "Calendar Reform", Nature 366 (1993) 716.
- ^ The Holocene Calendar at Meerkat Meade
- ^ The Human Era Calendar by Harry and Svetlana Weseman
- 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 9780471298274. http://books.google.com/books?id=fsni_qV-FJoC&printsec=frontcover&pg=PA149.
- Günther A. Wagner (1998). Age Determination of Young Rocks and Artifacts: Physical and Chemical Clocks in Quaternary Geology and Archeology. Springer. p. 48. ISBN 9783540634362. http://books.google.com/books?id=ADuZDCa08kwC&pg=PA48.
- Timeline of World History
- "News and comment", Geology Today, 20/3 (2004) 89–96.
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