• Question: Why did us humans only start counting our existence in years, 2017 years ago?

    Asked by Ayrton to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 6 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Oli Wilson

      Oli Wilson answered on 6 Nov 2017:

      People have actually been counting years for thousands of years – far longer than 2017 years! Ancient civilisations in places like Sumeria (in the Middle East) and China came up with ways of counting days and months, so they had calendars not too different to ours. Most of the world divides time into years AD and BC (BC means ‘before Christ’ and AD means ‘anno domini’ (the year of our Lord)) because that’s how Europeans did it, and Europeans have spread their ideas around lots of the globe. But it’s not universal at all – have a look at this wikipedia page to see what else this year is (from 173 to 5778 and beyond!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Year_in_various_calendars

Comments