Human Era

"Holocene era" redirects here. For the geological epoch, see Holocene.

The Human Era, also known as the Holocene calendar or Holocene 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. Human Era 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 scientist, Cesare Emiliani in 1993 (11993 HE).^[1][2][3]

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.

Conversion

Conversion to the Human 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	Human Era Holocene Epoch
c. 30000 BC	c. 20000 BHE
10001 BC	0 HE
10000 BC	1 HE
2 BC	9999 HE
1 BC	10000 HE
AD 1	10001 HE
AD 2	10002 HE
AD 2011	12011 HE
AD 10000	20000 HE

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.

References

1. ^ Cesare Emiliani, "Calendar Reform", Nature 366 (1993) 716.
2. ^ The Holocene Calendar at Meerkat Meade.
3. ^ Human Era Calendar by Harry 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.