Have we moved into ‘the human epoch’ ?
by Lewis, 1 May, 2016, 4 comments
As a species, we humans have only been present on the Earth for a ‘blink of the eye’ in geological terms. The Earth is approximately some 4.6 billion years old. Geologists have divided up these years into a number of geological periods or epochs - from the Pre-cambrian (from the formation of the earth until about 540 million years ago) to the most recent - the Holocene, which started at the end of the last Ice Age - about 12,000 years ago.
Modern Humans emerged out of Africa probably some 200,000 years ago, and since that time they have increased massively in number. At the end of the C18th , there were probably about one billion people; now there are over seven billion.
We have changed the Earth in many ways. Read more...
