4 ms·

I got a bit of a headache when I saw that B.C.E dates are displayed on the slider like: 12-01--4. Four years before the Common Era, aka "-4"... hah! It seems IS

• gkya 11y ago
  I really like the Holocene Calendar. It adds ten thousand to any given anno domini, and thus moves the start of the calendar to 12016 years ago from today. For anything that happened before that, we're nearly guaranteed to not have very certain dates, so it's very uncommon to need to use BHE (before holocene era) with the holocene calendar. 4 B.C.E is 9997 HE, 753 B.C.E. is 9248 HE (Holocene era). For AD add 10.000, for BC subtract from 10.001, as it has a year zero. And even the dates for the construction of Gobeklitepe can be expressed in positive years.
  • Semiapies 11y ago
    I like the idea of the Holocene Calendar, but there were already archaeological sites known to be older than twelve thousand years when it was devised. As archaeologists find older developed structures and dating methods get more precise, negative HC dates get pretty likely.
    • gkya 11y ago
      Unless we didn't take the big bang as the first year, negative dates will exist. From an archaeological stance, 12.000 or maybe 15.000 years would be better, but 10.000 has an advantage: for anni domini we stay in the same millennium, i.e. 2016 becomes 12016, which is easier to parse at a glance than 14016. I really wonder which +12.000 yrs old sites you're referring to (no rhetoric intended, I'm really curious).
      • Semiapies 11y ago
        Clovis culture sites, for one. I'd pondered just making it CE + twenty thousand years.
        • gkya 11y ago
          That's equally viable, just like any multiple of ten, but I think that ten thousand is easier to parse, and that we won't find enough BHE events to use twenty thousand. Though my guesses and thoughts are uninformed here, and I'm mostly interested in middle-eastern and european antichity, not archaeology and geology.
          • Semiapies 11y ago
            That's fair.