> milk fermentation can be traced back to 6000–4000 BC in India,2 and Mediterranean populations produced and consumed cheese as early as 7000 before present (BP)
I haven't come across 'before present' (other than generically) before - what's the distinction from +2000BC (i.e. 5000BC here) such that both end up used in the same sentence, making it awkward to see the relationship between dates?
"Before Present" seems foolish.
The document that uses it then has to then be dated.
e.g. "I warmed up dinner one minute before present" ---> said ??? minutes ago. --> is dinner still warm? who knows.
I get that "about 7,000 years ago" is still going to be "about 7,000 years" for a very long time.
Still. Seems shortsighted to communicate dates via a moving target, especially for something that's already supposed to be thinking in very long terms.
Archaeologists, you'd think, would expect their words to stick around a long, long time, why would they use a short-sighted dating mechanism?
British Petroleum would beg to differ
but it is getting silly, all these two-letter acronyms to indicate before or after the non-existing Julian or Gregorian year zero
BP is commonly used for geologic and evolutionary timescales where 2000 years doesn't actually make much of a difference, but I rarely see it used for less than Holocene-spanning timelines.
Sure makes it easier to understand if your intention is to portray the age rather than the relation to specific dated historical events.
In this specific case, perhaps the dates have been taken from two different sources and the author has not made the effort to convert them to a common format.
In general, dates "before present" are used for the dates determined from carbon 14 decay, which do not have an intrinsic relationship with any calendar.
A prehistoric cheese that is 7000 years old must have been dated with carbon 14, so "before present" would be the original dating, not yet converted to the Christian calendar.
Apparently if the source is written word, then BC is used as that was their source of truth. But if carbon dating or some other scientific method was used, BP is used secularly: https://chatgpt.com/share/66fe7080-5340-8000-ade3-bace6425b4...
I followed the recent submission to HN about making your own chilli sauce. I just bottled my first batch this week and had gone down the rabbit hole of studying fermentation.
I don't think I'd otherwise have been so enthusiastic to read an article on cheese...
Home cheesemaking is super fun! Give it a go! I wrote an intro article about it a while back: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2015/09/27/cheesemaking-in-my... Gouda is a great one to start with. Camembert was my favorite, it turned out significantly tastier than what you can get at the store.