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The Historicene Calendar: We propose a new timeline that treats human history as a continuous scale, thereby eliminating the awkwardness of labeling pre-Christian Era dates "backwards." The historical timeline currently in use assigns the year "one" to the year of Jesus' birth, and all prior dates ascend “in reverse.” That reverse order of ascending dates seems counterintuitive to the natural understanding of history as a series of events flowing “forward” in time. Furthermore, determining the interval between a “BC” date and an “AD” date is problematic due to the lack of a year zero. Our proposal is not motivated by any religious issues. We accept that the date of Jesus' birth is the central chronological metric of Western Civilization's evolution. Our proposal should not be considered to be a commentary on Christian culture or on any other culture's possible ascension to historic centrality. Our proposal is simply an attempt to streamline a system that divides history into arbitrary epochs unrelated to the totality of human experience. Cleopatra lived from 69 to 30 BC; Plato lived from 428 to 348 BC. How old were they when they died? Folks not blessed with mathematical quickness might have to think a bit before realizing they've got to subtract the death year from the birth year. A more serious problem arises when trying to determine the interval between a BC date and an AD date. It's not as simple as adding the BC date to the AD date — because our current timeline is missing a year zero! If you ask how old a person born in 20 BC would be on their birthday in AD 20, most people would answer “40”; they got that by adding the BC and AD years. But if you look at the chart below to see how old a person born in 1 BC is on their birthday in AD 1, you can see their age would be one year, not two. And 20 BC and AD 20 are 39 years apart, not 40.  Our proposal: Go back to before the beginning of modern human history, which is around 6000 BC. So, let's begin our new historical timeline at 6000 BC. That keeps it simple because there are no specific known historical dates prior to that time. Here in the present era we'd simply need to add 6000 to the current date. So this is the year 8020 — 2020 plus 6000. Once we replace the current discontinuous scale with our proposed scale, all years starting with (old) 6000 BC are numbered sequentially; to get the new date for the BC era, subtract the BC date from 6001, making 1 BC the year 6000. To calculate Plato's newly-designated birth year, subtract 428 from 6001 — he was born in the newly-designated Year 5573. He lived 80 years, dying in 5653 (6001 minus 348). Cleopatra lived from 5932 (6001 minus 69 years BC) to 5971 (6001 minus 30 BC). Born in 5932; died in 5971. She lived to be 39. Wikipedia pegs the oldest historical date at 3200 BC ("Sumerian cuneiform writing system"). That would be 2801 in the new system (6001 minus 3200). So there would be a "cushion" of 2800 years before civilization gets rolling, and that's plenty of time in case scientists calculate, through ever-improving archeological techniques, specific dates of events or inventions or lifespans that happened at the dawn of history — we wouldn't have to number them backwards. Prior to this new Year One a.k.a. 6000 BC a.k.a. 8020 years ago, any dates probably would be indefinite and so we could simply refer to prehistory by saying x number of years ago — "around 10,000 years ago" sounds better, for example, than "around 8000 years BC." Here is an historical dating system similar to our proposal — it's called the Holocene Calendar and it starts numbering the years 10,000 years before the current Year 1 AD, at the beginning of what's called the Holocene geological epoch (the current era). Conveniently, that's around the end of the Ice Age, the beginning of the development of agriculture, the establishment of cities et cetera. We don't like this system because it adds an extra numeral to the date, making it so that years have five numbers — this is the year 12,020 — how would that work out on today's computing systems??? But, we do like that this current age is called the Human Era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar Our system is superior because it doesn't add another numeral to the already-overburdened computer dating systems. With ours it's now 8020, not 10,020.
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