Marburg-Marbach

The Book of Sedna is a social project aimed to reading over the mainstream narrative of the human progress and creating a working alliance for a more comprehensive and fair account of the history, from Lucy to Hal 9000. In 1993 the Italian-American scientist Cesare Emiliani proposed a calendar reform based on the current geologic epoch, the “entirely new” Holocene (HE), by adding exactly 10.000 years to the dominant (AD/BC or CE/BCE) numbering scheme and placing the year “0” near the beginning of the Neolithic revolution. Emiliani’s idea would bring enormous benefits in terms of archaeological, anthropological, and historical dating. Unfortunately, it is based on a rough approximation of what can be considered the start of the Holocene. This approach will hardly reach broad consensus. But the idea itself is revolutionary. The Holocene geologic epoch and the Neolithic age came together to mark a pivotal moment in our history, when in separate locations worldwide humans started the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settling and farming. The way we describe the consequences of this breakthrough affects the way we think at the development of humanity and, broadly speaking, the way we think of humanity itself. The goal of the workcamp is to let participants reflect on cultural differences among ethnical groups along the history and around the world, and show that no culture is better or worse than others, no way of life is definitely dominant, they are just different paths taken by members of the one human species.