Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

The discovery of a dismantled stone circle—close to Stonehenge's bluestone quarries in west Wales—raises the possibility that a 900-year-old legend about Stonehenge being built from an earlier stone circle contains a grain of truth. Radiocarbon and OSL dating of Waun Mawn indicate construction c. 3000 BC, shortly before the initial construction of Stonehenge. The identical diameters of Waun Mawn and the enclosing ditch of Stonehenge, and their orientations on the midsummer solstice sunrise, suggest that at least part of the Waun Mawn circle was brought from west Wales to Salisbury Plain. This interpretation complements recent isotope work that supports a hypothesis of migration of both people and animals from Wales to Stonehenge.

Why did you start counting at around 3.000BC? the real scale in my opinion would be around 40.000 years ago, with Homo Sapiens.
Course in that case you would have 40000/30=1333 generations where nothing happens during 1200 generations. A bit boring story.

I was definitely taught in terms of "chunks" in my history lessons from the first to the university under some six or seven different teachers. Year-numbers were there, but so were the "chunks" like Bronze Age, Dark Age, Medieval Times, Age of Enlightenment. Did jax have a single bad history teacher throughout his school years?

Moreover, the chunks cannot be universalised. In different places there are different ages at the same absolute time, because the titles of the ages are descriptive of level of culture, not of time. For example, the people of Papua New Guinea are still happily in Stone Age as we speak, though somewhat distracted from it by an occasional smartphone.

Exactly. That framework we learned at school is unusable, and not interoperable.

Teaching history to children is pretty futile to begin with.

The chunks in my framework are completely arbitrary, but to which we can attach mnemonic labels as desired.

I promise to examine "your" charts after a while. (I'm gonna have to print them out!)

Is just my computer or Oakdale is posting with invisible ink?? 

The school framework is used and it brought us to where we are, thus it is usable. And everybody who has given a thought to the matter understands that global interoperability cannot be had, as long as local cultures evolving at variant speeds are to be adequately described.

The global interoperability, providing an occasional synchronisation to connect the timelines of local cultures, archeological-philological evidence permitting, is the Western year-numbers BC/AD method. So all the necessary pieces in history education are already there.

Quote from: jax on 2021-03-21, 18:32:43

Teaching history to children is pretty futile to begin with.

A general anti-educational attitude will definitely not help your cause.

Quote from: jax on 2021-03-21, 18:32:43

The chunks in my framework are completely arbitrary, but to which we can attach mnemonic labels as desired.

Also now the chunks are arbitrarily named (Middle Ages? Early Modern times? As times move on, these are bound to be renamed, so there should have been some deeper thought given to naming them in the first place). And the labels are mnemonic enough for teaching children. If the system is unusable to teach children, it is useless.

The current system is already in the spirit that you try to achieve, "Something is easier to remember if it has a name, even if a name is misleading. Names, just like the end points of generations, are arbitrary. In principle the names might be something like Alice and Bob, but hooks help." The current labels of eras are based on a messy, essentially arbitrary system of hooks to provide a reference point to the era, so we are already there.

I am no better at maths now than I was at my early 20s, I am probably significantly worse. But I do know a whole lot more history. That is pretty typical. We learn more, even much more, history after school than we did in school. I'd venture the guess that is the case most of you.