Although humans have existed for longer, for more than ten thousand years human civilization, the aggregate of complex societies or culture groups defined as “characterized by dependence upon agriculture, long-distance trade, state form of government, occupational specialization, population, and class stratification”, has occupied and flourished on this Earth almost entirely within the Holocene era, a geological epoch which began approximately 11,700 years ago.
Virtually all of recorded human history takes place within the Holocene, and for most of those 12 millennia humans lived in relative harmony with the planet as integral parts of the ecosystem, or at least did not have the ability to affect the ecosystem negatively, and with only some relatively minor fluctuations Earth’s climate has remained fairly stable throughout Holocene era.
— how we lived in harmony with the planet during the holocene —
It is only in the last couple of hundred years that “since the Industrial Revolution, a new era has arisen, the Anthropocene, in which human actions have become the main driver of global environmental change”, say the authors
