+10,000
Nothing happened 2,018 years ago on the first day of January. Bizarrely, Pope Gregory XIII, who gave us our modern calendar back in 1582, set the start of the calendar, the totally nonsensical and baseless estimation of the year of Jesus' birth, not as year zero but as year one. Uh, what? But worse than being merely confusing or arbitrary (as any calendar will have some amount of embedded randomness) it really doesn't make much sense to impose such a thing on all humans. Does it? I mean, if you're going to make a thing universal why not attempt something that might at the very least encompasses some cross-cultural majority of humanity? Moreover, aside from the cultural and religious implications of it, having the Gregorian calendar as our standard measure of time badly distorts our collective perspective by failing to capture almost all, not less than 80%, of what is well-recognized to be the modern human experience. Surely that alone is no small downside. Doing this conceals how slow human progress has been and just how recent and exponentially radiating almost all our developments have been. And, as such, labelling this year as the 2,018th feels, to me at least, quite a bit like insisting the earth is just six thousand years old.
But overturning our calendar year in favour of something more globally relevant and historically accurate needn't be a complex, logistic nightmare. If one was going to attempt to construct a universal calendar, having such a scheme simply begin closer to when civilization emerged (roughly the time we started making calendars) seems plainly rational and humanistic – while being culturally non-specific. And, while we may learn much more about the birth and infancy of civilization in coming decades, just adding ten thousand years, a single numeral, to our current calendar year (from 2018 to 12018) – to account for some of what archaeology, linguistics, and biology have taught us since the time of Pope Gregory XIII – makes some sense. In this way, unlike 2018, calling our current year 12018 has the benefit of not directly contradicting essentially all of contemporary human understanding. Surely that's something, and an improvement over the current measure.
But this isn’t my idea. No. Cesare Emiliani, geologist and father of paleoceanography, proposed this change to our calendar back in 1993 (or [1]1993). And he called his idea the “Holocene Calendar” and with it sought to establish the “Human Era” (HE). This, I believe, is an idea whose time has come.
But why this number? Why add 10,000 years or another number? Well, prior to the end of the last global Ice Age (75,000 to 15,000 years ago) humans and our stockier sister species, the Neanderthals and Denisovans (with whom we'd been living and interbreeding), were all confined to the more hospitable lower latitudes and with populations of similar size. (Current estimates say there were probably thousands of us but at most tens of thousands.) Yet, by the time the climate warmed and major glaciers receded, revealing large swathes of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, all our closest Homo genus relatives were extinct and we, Homo sapiens, had spread across the globe.
This is when things really began to change for our species. Around twelve thousand years ago, the tenth millennium BCE, or “Year Zero” of the Human Era, there's evidence that people started becoming less nomadic and more sedentary. And here is where we see the first major human construction project begin in Southern Anatolia, near the southern border of what is now Turkey. Using only stone tools, a band of hunter-gatherers chiseled out slabs of bedrock for the construction of what appears to be the first temple, known as Gobekli Tepe, suspected of being built for the worship of gods forgotten and extinct. Approximately a thousand years later (9000 BCE or 1000 HE) came the first cities: Çatalhöyük (just 600km west of Gobekli Tepe) and Jericho (not terribly far south, near the Jordan river in the West Bank), both of which were home to maybe one or two thousand people.
Over the few eons that followed, along with domestication of plants and animals, large permanent settlements erupted across the planet. These changes allowed the human population to bump up from probably less than a million to something like five million. Around 9,000 years ago (7000 BCE or 3000 HE) signs of the first cultural communities sprang up in China, India, and around the Fertile Crescent. By 6000 BCE (4000 HE) humans had discovered metal working. And it took another thousand years before the game-changing development of smelting copper and tin to make more durable bronze. It was around this period (5000 BCE or 5000 HE) the wheel was invented, the first viable forms of writing (cuneiform and hieroglyphs) emerged, and South Americans (namely the Chinchorro, living on the coast of the Atacama Desert in modern-day Peru and Chile) started mummifying their dead. Also from this period is the oldest remaining stone building, the Cairn of Barnenez, constructed in the north of France.
It was approximately another millennium (6000 HE) before Stonehenge was erected and the Egyptian, Sumerian, Minoan, and Indus Valley civilizations flowered. Soon after came the Norte Chico of north-central Peru, who developed their own monumental communal constructions – of which their city at Caral appears to be the oldest urban centre in the Americas and perhaps the densest populated place on the globe at the time. This was a period in which technology and civilizational cooperation resulted in a boom in human population, climbing to an estimated thirty million (a number roughly that of the largest urban areas today: Tokyo, Jakarta, and San Paulo.)
Midnight, February 18, 6899 HE, began the Kali Yuga, Dark Age or Age of Discord, in Hindu cosmology – marked by Lord Krishna's departure from earth and his return to his celestial abode, Vaikuntha. (Don't worry, this period of avarice, ignorance, wrath, and sin should only last another 427,000 years or so.) The kingdom of Gojoseon was formed in Korea in 7667 HE by god-king Dangun Wanggeom (offspring of Ungnyeo, “bear-woman”, and Hwanung, son of the sky God Hwanin.)
8000 HE saw King Shulgi, self-proclaimed deity, complete the Great Ziggurat of Ur, located in present-day Dhi Qar Province, Iraq. In 8180 HE Sumu-abum became the first King of the First Dynasty of Babylon. And on Tuesday, January 1st, 8300 HE Hebrew monotheism emerged. The Nubian Kingdom of Kerma, first kingdom of Sub-Saharan Africa, had constructed a settlement next to the Nile by this, in what is now Sudan, housing ten thousand people around a central temple, the Western Deffufa. Genetic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence places the Lapita Peoples (ancestors to modern Polynesians, Melanesians, and some Micronesians) in the Pacific islands starting at around 8600 HE. By 8700 HE the Maya had established their impressive religious center at El Mirador, in what is now Guatemala. And about the same time as the Siege of Troy, 8850 HE, the Olmec built their first urban centre at San Lorenzo, on the Coatzacoalcos River in the modern state of Veracruz, Mexico.
9500 HE saw the dawn of Western Civilization. The first Imperial dynasty of China, the Qin dynasty, was established in 9792 HE. Rome destroyed Carthage in 9800 HE. Teotihuacan, the sprawling city and religious centre of vibrant murals and Mesoamerican pyramids, came into being around 9900 HE. Born in 9931 HE was Cleopatra VII (who was of Greek ancestry, likely the product of incest, and who herself married both of her adolescent bothers before killing them along with her sister). And on the Ides of March, in 9966 HE, Gaius Julius Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times, leading to the turmoil that resulted in the fall of the Roman Republic. 9995 HE marks a vaguely respectable estimate for "anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi." And by the start of the Gregorian calendar, 10000 HE, the global population had climbed to nearly three hundred million (the size of a large nation today, like Indonesia or the United States.)
All of this critical history is obfuscated by the assertion or implication that everything worth noticing began just 2,000 years ago. We can do better than that, for ourselves and anyone wishing to be part of a 121st century global civilization.
