Here is a story about how there is supposedly a new bio-geological age now replacing the so called Holocene. But if ‘Anthropocene‘ means a period when human activity has drastically altered nature, it began 50,000 years ago, when the first humans arrived in Australia, and shortly afterwards the large marsupial mammals – the equivalents of lions and tigers and bears and all that – went extinct.  It spread to North America less than 40,000 years later; when humans arrived in North America there was a great extinction of large mammals.  So I think we have some nerve saying that radical human alteration of the environment is some recent thing.