January 1, 2017

Happy 12,017

Yeah, 12,017. Why not? And I do mean the year that begins today per the Gregorian Calendar.

This is a surprisingly well thought idea that some prehistorianists (i.e. those who like Prehistory, regardless of wage-earning profession) have proposed: to get rid of the clearly uncomfortable Christian Era, alias Roman Era, alias Common or Conventional Era (CE) by adding 10,000 years to it and roughly starting counting at Göbekli Tepe (approx. date, because it's impossible to pinpoint an exact date, but the same happens with the alleged birth of baby Jesus anyhow), without doubt the first "civilizational" type of monument ever built, incidentally getting rid of negative counting for at least the whole Holocene (a most convenient feature indeed). 

They propose to call it the "Human Era" (HE), although I'd rather think that the Human Era begins with humans and that would be c. 200,000 years ago for Homo sapiens and two million years ago for the overall Homo genus, Humankind generally speaking. So maybe it's better to call it the Monumental Era, the Megalithic (big stone) Era or just the Mega-Era, for short. It'd be ME in any case.

The proposal, as far as I can tell, was made by Kurzgesagt, one of the YouTube channels that provide a good mix of entertainment and information for people interested in history and prehistory, young and elderly alike:




And I like it quite a bit, of course. So maybe worth spreading around, don't you think? 

In any case, I wish you all a happy and productive new year, one in which things may hopefully change for the better and not for the worse, for a change. 

And, like in every New Year Day, the holiday where most work is made, because of that floating notion that you are supposed to made up for all the laziness and procrastination of the past year, I will now proceed to assault my quite fatty "to do" list, and tell you about things that you may or not know already but that I think are worth taking note of.

5 comments:

  1. Sorry, not a new idea. Was being pushed in (soft core) occult circles such as wicca in the 1970s. Expat Hungarian "feminist witch" Zsuzsanna Budapest was on board with this idea when I knew her in 1979. In order to disassociate themselves from the Christian calendar they added 10,000 to the current year and called it (more accurately than HE) ADA for after development of agriculture. Solar "traditions" (if they really are traditions) such as wicca were supposed to have come from the idea of needing an agricultural calendar at the dawn of the neolithic.

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    1. I didn't know that. Still an idea worth pushing forth, as it's pointless to use calendars that refer to religious sects private stuff and making up a new calendar "after United Nations" or something like that is not going to solve anything (UN is hated by many, not consolidated, may break apart at any moment).

      It wouldn't be the same crhonology anyhow because AFAIK, 12 Ka ago there was still no agriculture, certainly not in or near Göbekli.

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  2. Happy New Year and let's hope for more interesting discoveries in 2017 (or 12017).

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  3. I like the fact that the Western remains of Christendom still use the Anno Domini dating. Just like the Japanese still use the Koki and Nengou systems, or the Chinese use their NianHao era system, or the Islamic countries use the Hijri where year zero is 622 AD, or the Israeli dating system that starts at 3761 BC.

    The urge to eliminate European culture heritage from modern Western life, just to seem secular, contemporary and inclusive, baffles me.

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    1. I'm European and I'm extremely tired of the imposition of monotheistic dogma on our society, which should be strictly secular.

      In addition to that I must say that Christianity is not a European religion but that it originated in Palestine, which is not in Europe, as you may know. Of course nearly everything in Europe can be ultimately tracked to West Asia but still this particular patriarchal religion, Judeo-Christo-Muslim beliefs such as "creation" or a hating intolerant and genocidal "god" which have been once and again proved false by science (i.e. it's an evil lie for stupid people) and whose establishment led to the darkest period in our history, in which the works of ancient wise men were erased to replace them with "psalms"(whatever psalms are) and false prophecies, in which people were burnt at the stake for slipping out of the Christian dogma even in the slightiest and that has produced such hated criminals like Torquemada, Kremer, De Lancre or Franco, is despicable in nearly everything.

      Europe began to be saved from that dictatorship of obscurantism, and also from feudalism (i.e. generalized slavery) in 1789, and three years later it was briefly introduced the Cult of Reason, whose long term impact, under more modest pretensions, is what has made of Europe a half-decent place to live and has made the World jump from darkness to great knowledge and development. This is the Europe I love: the secular Europe of freedom, science and which hopes to go even further into eco-socialism, dumping into the dark hole of which it was born the teachings of dogmatic obscurantism.

      Europe and European culture are about anything but religious dogma.

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