12 February 2004
Geological time: Epoch making
The most recent geological epoch is the Holocene, the ten to twelve thousand years since the most recent ice age. The textbooks state that we are still in the Holocene, but are we in fact already into the next epoch, the Anthropocene? That's a newly proposed epoch covering the time in which the human geological impact on the Earth has become significant. Some proponents look to the industrial revolution as the time when human activity became dominant, geologically speaking. But according to one researcher, the Anthropocene could have started 8,000 years ago.
Climate change: The hot hand of history
BETSY MASON
We may not have known we were doing it, but humans have been changing
the climate for thousands of years, a new theory suggests. Could our ancestors
have saved us from an ice age? Betsy Mason investigates.
Nature 427, 582–583 (2004); doi:10.1038/427582a
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