This article appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of Discover magazine as "The Anthropocene’s Ancient Origins." Subscribe for more stories like these.
There’s no doubt humans are at Earth’s helm, setting the course of future climate and biodiversity. 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. Welcome to the Anthropocene, a proposed new epoch in Earth history, in which Homo sapiens are blindly steering the ship.
For the past decade, a scientific committee known as the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) has been investigating when the Anthropocene began. In 2016, they voted for a 1950s start. 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.
