Posts Tagged ‘humans’

Since the Late Pleistocene Humans Were Already Radically Transforming the Earth

By Jackson Landers | Smithsonian Magazine | June 7, 2016 “The idea of trying to restore things to a pristine state is not possible,” says Melinda Zeder, senior research scientist and curator of old world archaeology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “Humans are very much a part of nature,” Zeder says. “The ways in…

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Evolving Toward a Better Anthropocene

By Erle Ellis | The Breakthrough Institute | April 4, 2016 Humans have now transformed Earth to such a degree that a new epoch of geologic time, the Anthropocene, may soon mark the emergence of humanity as a “great force of nature.” The big question is why? Why did humans, and no other single multicellular species…

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Anthropocene: The Human Age

By Richard Monastersky | Nature | March 11, 2016 Almost all the dinosaurs have vanished from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. The fossil hall is now mostly empty and painted in deep shadows as palaeobiologist Scott Wing wanders through the cavernous room. Wing is part of a team carrying out a radical,…

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What Future Humans Will Learn From Our Remains

By Yasmin Tayag | Inverse | February 3, 2016 Millions of years from now, a future geologist will be digging deep into the Earth, seeking the truth about his notorious sapiens heritage. Excavating far beneath the year 100,000, scraping past 10,000, he’ll hit on 2016 and think: What the actual fuck happened here? A recent paper written by researchers with…

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How Humans are Driving the Sixth Mass Extinction

By Jeremy Hance | The Guardian | October 20, 2015 Periodically, in the vast spans of time that have preceded us, our planet’s living beings have been purged by planetary catastrophes so extreme they make your typical Ice Age look like the geological equivalent of a stroll in the park. Scientists count just five mass…

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