Welcome to 1711 AD - a conspiracy that doesn't piss me off

I went in search of a conspiracy theory I could think about that wouldn't raise my blood pressure. The first one I found was the Phantom Time Hypothesis.

According to Wikipedia:

It proposes that there has been a systematic effort to make it appear that periods of history, specifically that of Europe during Early Middle Ages (AD 614–911) exist, when they do not. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence.
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The theory also stems from the fact that the by the time the Gregorian calendar was introduced in AD 1582, the old Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar, should have produced a discrepancy of thirteen days between it and the real (or sidereal) calendar. In fact, the astronomers and mathematicians working for Pope Gregory found that the civil calendar needed to be adjusted by only ten days, and it thus appears that the calendar counted roughly three centuries which never existed.[2] The normal explanation for this discrepancy is that the Julian calendar must have been "updated" and two days removed at the Council of Nicea in AD 325, when the date for Easter was set. Yet there is no evidence in documents dealing with the Council that this occurred.

On a related note: Uwe Topper hypothesized that most of the world's history was written after the 16th century, and that much of that which occurred prior to AD 1400 should not be considered factual.

Illig and Topper's theories suggests that people like these might not really exist. Ooh, the horror!

According to the Daily Yoghurt (don't ask me why it's called that, dude, I just googled it.)

The basis of Illig's claims is the paucity of archaeological evidence that can be reliably dated to this period; perceived inadequacies of radiometric and dendrochronological methods of dating this period, and the over-reliance of medieval historians on written sources. For Western Europe, Illig claims the presence of Romanesque architecture in the tenth century as evidence that less than half a millennium could have passed since the fall of the Roman Empire, and concludes that the entire Carolingian period, including the person of Charles the Great, is a forgery of medieval chroniclers, more precisely a conspiracy instigated by Otto III and Gerbert d'Aurillac.

From Damn Interesting:

It seems that historians are plagued by a plethora of falsified documents from the Middle Ages, and such was the subject of an archaeological conference in München, Germany in 1986. In his lecture there, Horst Fuhrmann, president of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, described how some documents forged by the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages were created hundreds of years before their "great moments" arrived, after which they were embraced by medieval society. This implied that whomever produced the forgeries must have very skillfully anticipated the future… or there was some discrepancy in calculating dates.

This was reportedly the first bit of evidence that roused Illig's curiosity… he wondered why the church would have forged documents hundreds of years before they would become useful. So he and his group examined other fakes from preceding centuries, and they "divined chronological distortions." This led them to investigate the origin of the Gregorian calendar, which raised even more inconsistency.

In 1582, the Gregorian calendar we still use today was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII to replace the outdated Julian calendar which had been implemented in 45 BC. The Gregorian calendar was designed to correct for a ten-day discrepancy caused by the fact that the Julian year was 10.8 minutes too long. But by Heribert Illig's math, the 1,627 years which had passed since the Julian calendar started should have accrued a thirteen-day discrepancy… a ten-day error would have only taken 1,257 years.

If the Phantom Time Hypothesis is true, then it's not 2008, it's actually 1711. This would bode well for mankind, I think, as it would mean much of those dreary Dark Ages are only fictional.

It would also imply that our current rate of technological growth is somewhat less unprecedented and anomalous than it seemed previously, and while that would undermine some Asimov, it might actually give us reason to breathe a little easier about our collective fate.

And for those of us hoping to one day see proof of alien intelligence, the notion that progress from flint and tinder to electromagentic theory is a few hundred years shorter than we'd imagined is a good thing, even if it only increases our odds of contacting aliens by a few millionths of a percent.

Even if it's true, and the Phantom Time was manufactured for nefarious purposes, the people who knowingly perpetrated such lies are dead, and have been for generations. Neither they nor their lackeys remain in power. The deception has negligible impact on our daily life - I mean, sure, we'd have a different number atop our calendars, but unless you're really into numerology, that's no biggie.

In fact, I can only think of one really wretched downside that would apply if this conspiracy theory were true: Since much of the gap between Ancient Rome and the Rennaissance would be compacted, it has an impact on Arthurian studies. That notion that King Arthur were actually a Roman could prove to be true. And that movie sucked.