3 ms·
> We are currently in the Holocene. Do you know what that means? I don't think it means anything. It is the entire period from the last ice-age until present e
by VBprogrammer 4y ago
> We are currently in the Holocene. Do you know what that means?
I don't think it means anything. It is the entire period from the last ice-age until present encompassing the entirety of recorded history?
What do you think it means?
- the_third_wave 4y agoInstead of explaining I'll just add a link to one of those Wikipedia pages which still seems to be free from ideological bias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene The key thing to look for is this: The Holocene has been identified with the current warm period, known as MIS 1. It is considered by some to be an interglacial period within the Pleistocene Epoch, called the Flandrian interglacial. It is not 'the entire period from the last ice-age until present' because we're still in an ice age. The Holocene is the current interglacial period, before it came the Younger Dryas, what comes after it is of course as of yet unknown but given the way previous interglacials came and went it is likely to be followed by a long period of glaciation. The main takeaway is that the climate has been changing ever since the planet developed and will keep on doing so until there is no more atmosphere, i.e. when the sun blows up to encompass the orbit of Venus and strips the Earth's atmosphere off. That'll take a while so it is not necessary to start planning for this scenario. It was changing when Homo Sapiens developed some 300.000 years ago, it was changing when our species moved out of Africa - who knows, this might even have played a role in that migration. Homo Sapiens was there when a large part of the northern hemisphere was covered in land ice, 'we' were there when that ice retreated. We survived then, we will survive now.