Holocene

And that's what the great acceleration is.

That's why we talk about leaving the Holocene epoch and entering the Anthropocene epoch, where our human imprint is fundamentally changing the life support

systems of our Earth.

So what you're saying is, yeah, so if Earth has been through this before, but just got into it a little more slowly.

of this?

Yeah, that's a great characterization.

And then if you think about when, you know, Catherine Hayhoe was talking about when human civilizations really began to emerge and they're in the Holocene and when agriculture happened.

And for most of the last 12,000 years, we haven't seen a change of more than about one degree Celsius in the average surface temperature of our planet.

We get Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene.

And the last 10,000 years is the Holocene.

That's since the glaciers melted.

That's the period we call the Holocene, and roughly speaking, The world restocks itself with biodiversity in the Paleocene and Eocene.

We have roughly modern levels of biodiversity since the Oligocene, in terms of mammal families and things like that.

And most of the mammal orders have their roots in the Eocene and Paleocene.

thing? This one is really peculiar because it existed, according to YFull, which is a website that has information on different haplotypes, and it seems very reliable.

It was on the European continent before the Holocene or before 9,600 BC.

It was definitely in the Iron Gates culture, which is on the Balkans after the Holocene, so just after 9,600 BC.

It appears in Ukraine, right above the Crimean Peninsula.

It's a different strain that had stayed on the Balkan Peninsula and later vanished.

Yeah

... which is like, first off, how do you tell a story that has never existed? I mean, mankind, uh, the modern era, the historical era is the Holocene, right? The last 11,000 or 12,000 years where we had the four seasons, the climate stabilized after, you know, a few thousand years of people being like, "Is this for real?" They started doing things like Stonehenge, where they'd be like, "I think it's for real.

That star can st-," you know.

And, uh, it's ...

We empirically, without any scientific doubt, have exited- The Holocene, the remarkably stable period that created modern history.

So if you watch a movie like Digger and you don't know that, that's a completely different experience.

And I, I don't blame anyone.

Um, and we're shooting that right now, but there are so many stories.

Each episode will focus on a specific epoch of human existence.

The Pliocene, the Pleistocene, the Holocene and the Anthropocene.

And if I lost you with the word epoch, never fear, there'll be dick jokes aplenty.

LAUGHTER So sit down and shut your stupid mouth.

Its prognathism and encephalisation dated geochronologically via chronostratigraphic examination.

So let's keep it simple, shall we? This series is about the emergence of hominins and their ongoing relationship to the planet with each episode set during a specific time frame or epoch of human existence.

Namely, the Pliocene, where hominins inherit the house, the Pleistocene, where they live in the house, the Holocene, where they trash the house, and the Anthropocene, where they decide if they should restore, renovate, or abandon the house.

LAUGHTER It's a fixer-upper with a 300,000-year mortgage.