The Holocene Calnedar proposes adding 10,000 years to our current date, making this, the year 12016, replacing the BC and CE with HE, meaning Human Era, which symbolically began with the neolithic revolution, when humans transitioned from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture and fixed settlements.
The reasoning behind this change is mostly as follow:
The Anno Domini era is based on an erroneous estimation of the birth year of Jesus. The era places Jesus's birth year in AD 1, but modern scholars have determined that he was likely born in or before 4 BC. Emiliani argues that replacing it with the approximate beginning of the Holocene era makes sense.
The reported birth of Jesus is a less universally relevant epoch event than the approximate beginning of the Holocene era.
The years BC are counted down when moving from past to future, making calculation of time spans difficult.
The Anno Domini era has no year zero, with 1 BC followed immediately by AD 1, complicating the calculation of timespans furhter
It puts human history and development in a more appropriate time context, showing that we have been developing for over 10,000 years and not only the last 2000
While I can't speak for historians, this isn't a popular concept among archaeologists.
The primary objection here is that humans have been developing for well over 10,000 years, not just since the end of the Pleistocene. In fact, the majority of our history as a species is not in the Holocene at all.To deny that as "development" is to substitute the Christian value system of the AD/BC calendar for a modernist value system of "progress". If we want to be even more inclusive, we should even really incorporate the history of our ancestors outside the species itself because that history involves the development of, arguably, the most significant innovations in human history. Significant developments prior to the Holocene include language, bipedalism, and the origins of our long love affair with material culture, which includes such hits as the use of fire, development of art, and first tool use.
The other objection here is that the end of the Holocene, while certainly more significant globally than the birth of Jesus, is still not necessarily a universally significant event. When the Pleistocene-Holocene transition is posited as a universally significant event in Human history, we are - as I already mentioned - projecting a modernist value system onto human history by suggesting that the development of complex societies in a relatively small number of places in the world (6 to 8 depending on how you count) is the most significant occurrence in human history, or that only development leading to complex societies is in fact development. This effectively excludes many places of the world which either did not directly develop complex societies, or which only recently began to live in complex societies, from "human history". While many archaeologists think that of course the Pleistocene-Holocene transition is an important event in global history, it isn't the only important event and is exclusionary of the history of a large portion of the human population.
In other words, while the AD/BC system is based on a event that holds value for only one segment of the human population, a proposed Holocene calendar has a similar problem - if to a lesser degree - by basing the calendar on an event that, while it has more significance to more people than the birth of Jesus, is still based on a modernist value system that excludes huge parts of human history (the majority of human history that occurred pre-Holocene) and the history of people who only recently became involved in the processes started in he Pleistocene-Holocene transition.
As an alternative, some archaeologists use the system developed for reporting radiocarbon dates as a sort of secular calendar, but it has it's own problems. This system relates dates as "BP" or "Before Present", and counts back from the year 1950. So 2000 BP is 50BC, and 0BP is AD1950. The year 1950 was set because human interference with atmospheric carbon (because of industrialization and atomic testing) makes radiocarbon dating past that point extremely difficult. Some of the perils of this system include the fact that it is a poor choice for dating events since 1950. This isn't too relevant at present, since we are talking about 66 years of human history compared with the several million prior to 1950, but obviously this problem only gets worse the further we get past 1950.