The Brazil nut tree (Bertholletia excelsa) would have been useful to early civilizations and cultivated as such. The melting of mile-high glaciers 11,700 years ago ushered in the Holocene - an epoch characterized by fairly temperate conditions, amenable to agriculture, permanent settlements and civilization as we know it. For instance, the Late Cretaceous epoch ended 66 million years ago, with the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs. The AWG plans to propose adding the Anthropocene to the geological timescale, Earth’s official timeline, which is divided into phases based on dramatic environmental change evident from fossils and rocks. Most members contend that’s when humans became a global superpower, through both nuclear weapons testing and the post-World War II boom in population and production, known as the Great Acceleration. Welcome to the Anthropocene, a proposed new epoch in Earth history, in which Homo sapiens are blindly steering the ship.įor the past decade, a scientific committee known as the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) has been investigating when the Anthropocene began. Our species is now the dominant force shaping Earth’s climate and ecosystems, supplanting forces like solar orbit, volcanism and natural selection, which had directed the planet for most of its 4.5 billion years. There’s no doubt humans are at Earth’s helm, setting the course of future climate and biodiversity. This article appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of Discover magazine as "The Anthropocene’s Ancient Origins." Subscribe for more stories like these.
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