Duration/age of persons inaccurate

Q & A
#1

Hi there, I’m in my first steps of creating an extensive timeline on history of humankind, where I’d like to put real events and people on. For a huge amount of those, no exact birth and death dates are known. I therefore switched to an accurancy level of years or months (depends). Now, the problem is, if I create a person, i.e.

birth: 500 BC
death: 400 BC

His age=duration would be calculated and display as 100 years, which is not necessarily true, as he might be born later in the year but died earlier in terms of the month (like, born in December, but died in August), which would result in an age of 99 rather than 100. Aeon Timeline automatically displays 100 as it would always base its calculations on the maximum possible duration. Is there a way to prevent this - either by case or even in general?

Thanks!

#2

I think the problem may be that an event from 2022 to 2023 is somewhere between one day and two years minus one day long, if in fact it has actual dates. The compromise of calling it end-beginning seems OK for the general case.

When you set a date, you can pick the precision you want. If you don’t know the day, you could pick month precision and choose a month in the general vicinity of where the event actually begins or ends.

#3

No unfortunately there isn’t a way to prevent this, in cases like this it does set the maximum possible duration assuming that the birth date is at the beginning of the year and the end date is at the end.

You can add a date range instead so you define “Earliest Start”, “Latest Start”, “Earliest End”, “Latest End”, which would then you give a date range displayed instead, which would give you the range of ages that the person could be without knowing their exact birthdates, but I’m not sure if this would be what you are after.