A growing body of archeological, geomorphological, and paleoecological evidence

is accumulating that humans have had global and transformative effects on the ecosystems they occupied since the beginning of the Holocene. On normal (non-human) geological scales of time, very few geological epochs are defined on the basis of climatic or biological changes that occurred over such a short period of time. On these grounds, a strong case can be made that the Holocene should be replaced by the Anthropocene or combined with it as the Holocene/Anthropocene. I thank Geoff Bailey, Paul Dayton, Richard Talazoparib cell line Hoffman, Jeremy Jackson, Antonieta Jerardino, Patrick Kirch, Richard Klein, Kent Lightfoot, Heike Lotze, Curtis Marean, Daniel Pauly, Torben Rick, Teresa Steele, Kathlyn Stewart, David Yesner and other colleagues for sharing their insights into the antiquity of human fishing and its effects on coastal fisheries and ecosystems. I am also grateful to Todd Braje, Anne Chin, Kristina Gill, Timothy Horscroft,

Torben Rick, Victor Thompson, anonymous reviewers, and the editorial staff of Anthropocene for help with the review, revision, and publication of this paper. “
“We live in a time of rapid global environmental change as earth’s ecosystems and organisms adjust to decades, centuries, or more of anthropogenic perturbations (Jackson, PD-0332991 concentration 2010, La Sorte and Jetz, 2010 and Zalasiewicz et al., 2010) and climate change threatens to create even greater instability (U.S. Global Change Research Program, 2009). The magnitude of these environmental and climatic changes has prompted some researchers to propose that we now live in a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene. The onset of the Anthropocene has been linked to the Industrial Revolution, with its dramatic increases in CO2 production (Crutzen

and Stoermer, 2000, Crutzen, 2002 and Zalasiewicz et al., 2010), and a host of other events ranging from release of human made radionuclides to human induced sedimentation (Zalasiewicz et al., 2011a). The Anthropocene concept has focused scholarly and popular Tobramycin discourse on human domination of Earth’s ecosystems, becoming a catchall phrase used to define human environmental impacts and the modern ecological crisis. The definition and implications of the Anthropocene, however, are the subject of much debate. Some geologists find it improbable that the Anthropocene will leave any kind of geologic signature in the rock record, for instance, questioning how this epoch will be characterized in ensuing centuries and millennia (Autin and Holbrook, 2012 and Gale and Hoare, 2012). Archeologists are also debating the nature of the Anthropocene and the relationship of modern environmental problems to deeper time human–environmental impacts.