Holocene calendar
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The Holocene calendar, popular term for the Holocene Era count, Human Era count or Jōmon Era count (Japan), uses a dating system similar to astronomical year numbering but adds 10,000, placing a zero at the start of the Human Era (HE, the beginning of human civilization) the approximation of the Holocene Epoch (HE, post Ice Age) and the Jōmon Era (JE, the first historical period of Japan) for easier geological, archaeological, dendrochronological and historical dating. The current Gregorian year can be transformed by simply placing a 1 before it (ie: 12007). The Human Era proposal was first made by Cesare Emiliani in 11993 HE. [1] [2]
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[edit] Western motivation
Cesare Emiliani's proposal for a calendar reform sought to solve a number of problems with the current Gregorian Calendar, which currently serves as the commonly accepted world calendar. The issues 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.[3]
- Biblical scholarship is virtually unanimous that the birth of Jesus Christ would actually have been 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, HE 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] Gregorian conversion
Conversion to Holocene from Gregorian AD dates can be achieved by adding 10,000. BC dates are converted by subtracting the BC year from 10,001.
| Events | Gregorian years | Holocene Era Human Era |
| Neanderthals go extinct | c. 22000 BC | c.-12000 HE or c.12000 BHE |
| Aprox. time last relatives of Humans go extinct | 10001 BC | 0 HE |
| Jōmon historical period begins | 10000 BC | 1 HE |
| Aprox. end of the Sultanian settlement of Jericho | 7370 BC | 2631 HE |
| Possible creation of the Egyptian calendar | 4242 BC | 5759 HE |
| First Egyptian pyramid completed | 2611 BC | 7390 HE |
| Athens founded | 1235 BC | 8764 HE |
| Trial of Socrates | 399 BC | 9602 HE |
| Aprox. birth of Jesus according to Dionysius | 1 BC | 10000 HE |
| First year of the Christian Era count | AD 1 | 10001 HE |
| Fall of Rome | AD 476 | 10476 HE |
| Hindu-Arabic numerals printed in Europe | AD 1202 | 11202 HE |
| Current year | AD 2007 | 12007 HE |
| Last year of one of future millenium | AD 10000 | 20000 HE |
[edit] Japanese motivation
In Japan, to supplant the current use of regnal years while retaining the nengō system’s way to count years forward from the start, gannen of a new era, it has been proposed to introduce a “Jōmon Era” (JE) count to facilitate archaeological dating[citation needed].
[edit] Nengō period conversion
| Period | Gregorian years | Jōmon Era |
| Jōmon Gannen | 10000 BC | 1 JE |
| Incipient Jōmon | 10000 –7500 BC | 1– 2500 JE |
| Initial Jōmon | 7500 – 4000 BC | 2501 – 6000 JE |
| Early Jōmon | 4000 – 3000 BC | 6001 – 7000 JE |
| Middle Jōmon | 3000 – 2000 BC | 7001 – 8000 JE |
| Late Jōmon | 2000 – 1000 BC | 8001 – 9000 JE |
| Final Jōmon | 1000 – 300 BC | 9001 – 9700 JE |
| Japan Imperial power founded | 660 BC | 9341 JE |
| Yayoi period | 251 BC – 250 AD | 9750 –10250 JE |
[edit] References
- David Ewing Duncan (1999). The Calendar, 331–332. ISBN 1-85702-979-8.
- Cesare Emiliani (1993). Calendar reform. Nature, 366:716.
- Duncan Steel (2000). Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, pp.149-151.
- Günther A. Wagner (1998). Age Determination of Young Rocks and Artifacts: Physical and Chemical Clocks in Quaternary Geology and Archeology. Springer, p48.
