The Holocene expired
Enter the Anthropocene: a human epoch.
I am here when cities are gone.
I am here before the cities come.
I nourished the lonely men on horses.
I will keep the laughing men who ride iron.
— Carl Sandburg [1]
We owe Anthropocene to Paul Crutzen, winner of the Nobel Prize.
He believes that —
“The stratigraphic scale had to be supplemented by a new age to signal that mankind had become a force of telluric amplitude. After the Pleistocene, which opened the Quaternary 2.5 million years back, and the Holocene, which began 11,500 years ago, ‘It seems appropriate to assign the term “Anthropocene” to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch’”. [2]
This universe is 13.8 billion years old — we’re in the Phanerozoic Eon, which is divided in Eras, we’re currently in the Cenozoic; Eras are divided in periods, we’re in the Quaternary; these Periods are broken into Epochs, we’re currently living in the Holocene (the last 11,550 years of the Quaternary Period)…a matryoshka doll of time sets:
