Epoch· The columns of time

Holocene

11.7 ka → Today

The Holocene, the current epoch, opened 11,700 years ago with an unusually stable climate, and agriculture, cities and writing all appeared within it.

Current epoch, opened 11,700 years ago, characterised by unusual climatic stability and containing the appearance of agriculture, cities and writing.

What the evidence shows

Its base is defined in a Greenland ice core at 11,700 years before the year 2000, one of only two limits on the chart fixed in ice rather than rock. Its distinctive character is constancy: no glacial cycle, and temperature departures an order of magnitude smaller than those that paced the Pleistocene. That constancy conditions what follows, since bringing ground into cultivation presupposes that the climate there will remain suitable over several decades. By 11,500 years ago at the latest, the inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent were already managing plants and animals still wild in form, the changes in seeds and bones by which archaeology identifies domestication postdating by millennia the practice that produces them. Its three ages, the Greenlandian, the Northgrippian and the Meghalayan, are defined on climatic events and not on that history.

Bounds and conventions

The base is precisely defined. The top is the present according to the chart: a proposal to end the epoch in the mid-twentieth century in favour of an Anthropocene series was formally examined and rejected. Its subdivision is unusual and has been criticised as such, each of its three limits being defined on a climatic event read in a single archive.

Base at the GSSP of the NGRIP2 core, 11,700 years b2k.