Anthropocene: New dates proposed for the 'Age of Man'

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31836233

 

Another writer called this the homogocene. That is, the era when the biosphere of the world began to homogenize, as all of the world's landmasses became exposed to the flora and fauna of all the other landmasses.

 

The first arrival of Eurasians on North America had probably just as big an impact as the later one. It triggered a massive extinction event. Although, from a geological perspective, I'm not sure 10,000 years makes a huge difference, so I suppose we could start it at either time.

 

When the ancestors of the Native Americans crossed the Bearing Straight, that event did not have global ecological consequences. And it's debatable how much it even caused the extinction of much of the mega-fauna of the Americas. But the European exploration and colonization of the Americas, and then of Oceania and Asia is a different story. Now it's not the case of one apex predator expanding into a new territory. Now it's a case of a multi-axis transfer of many organisms all up and down the food chain. This is a beginning of a convergence of all of the biota of all of the regions of earth. This is the beginning of a mass extinction as thorough, and faster, than any of the mass extinctions which ever occurred on earth.