The beginning of the Holocene around 11700 BP might serve as a good objective reference point. Nearly every interesting thing that happened in the history of hu

The beginning of the Holocene around 11700 BP might serve as a good objective reference point. Nearly every interesting thing that happened in the history of human civilization took place in the Holocene. No more negative years to worry about! "Present" in "before present" (BP) usually means 1950 AD [1], so this year would be Year 11764 of the Holocene epoch. Brb, gotta find some COBOL programmers to fix that Y10K problem. But then, the starting date of 11700 BP is also kinda arbitrary. No single short-term event defines the boundary between Pleistocene and Holocene, so we're still left with a sizable margin of error, probably even larger than the error in Jesus' date of birth. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present