I say official, because, just like the Queen’s, the date does not actually mean much from a natal perspective. Nonetheless, the night preceding, or the morning of, October 23rd, 4004 BC is the date that Archbishop Ussher, after a bit of fudging around with Biblical genealogies, reportedly assigned as the moment in which our planet popped into existence.
For the full story, go read some Stephen Jay Gould. Or better yet, read this book. The take home message is that Ussher can be forgiven for treating the Bible as literal history, and indeed should be saluted as a fine scholar. His modern day contempories, on the other hand, are cut from an entirely different (anti-)intellectual cloth. Although they have to work quite hard at it nowadays (via Exploring Our Matrix):
And, just for a sense of just how much these people are denying:
Whilst I know that you should always err on the side of caution with a lady’s age, this is like telling a 35 year old they look they were conceived less than half an hour ago.
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