Two and a half million years ago, Homo skillful, sitting on a fallen log in the throat of Olduvai, Tanzania, did not take his eyes off something that his clumsy hands wielded.
They were a pair of pebbles that he collected from the African soil and with them, on the basis of trial and error, he managed to manufacture the first stone utensil and incidentally cross the threshold of the Paleolithic, en route to the fastest and most formidable physical and mental evolution and cultural never occurred with any other species on this hospitable planet called Earth.
It took just two and a half million years to make flint weapons, tools and utensils, as well as beautiful cave paintings and expressive sculptures. Then, some time later, issues no longer so simple, such as the making of wheat bread, ten thousand years ago, or artificial intelligence, currently under development, a science that is too complex from any point of view. The time elapsed between both events for other species is not enough to change the colors of hair or plumage, unless the human hand intervenes in it.
Some time ago I wrote, in caricature mode, that we should still consider ourselves in the Neolithic Age and call ourselves Homo neo-habilis and take off the sapiens, despite wheat bread and artificial intelligence, until we resolve our coexistence with the environment and guarantee the survival of our species and that of the enormous biodiversity that coexists with us. Only later would the title of Homo sapiens correspond to us.
On the other hand, still in cartoon mode, considering that we are still in the Neolithic would give us the advantage of a sense of location, especially for the new generations, who will have the arduous task of finding the way out of the climate crisis and navigating towards a new port called future. If that sea will be calm or turbulent we will see it in a few years. Without waiting for it, there are already many young people incorporated into activism on Earth. Worth it.
Just as we can intervene from hair and plumage of any color, we have managed to intervene on the planet itself, thereby inaugurating the Anthropocene. This concept was coined by Paul Crutzen, Nobel laureate in chemistry, in 2000, although it was only recently that a group of specialists gave impetus to the new name. Although it has not been accepted, it is a good reference to the present stage of the Earth. The scientists agreed that this period has canceled the Holocene, placing the year 1950 as a division between the two.
The onset of the Holocene established the end of the Würm glaciation, about twelve thousand years ago. The favorable climate and abundance of resources, together with 60,000 years of challenges and survival training, from which a few thousand humans emerged strengthened, those who were able to withstand the prolonged freezing weather, with some very hostile periods, especially the last 15 a thousand years, the ice age itself. These men and women were the pioneers of a vertiginous expansion of our species on the planet, whose descendants today already almost reach 7.5 billion beings.
The Anthropocene, according to the researchers, begins with the discovery of radioactive waste left behind by atomic bombs. "We have already changed the Earth: the Anthropocene is the time when humans managed to change the life cycle of the planet, when humans took the planet out of its natural variability, " explains Alejandro Cearreta, Spanish scientist and member of the aforementioned group, made up of 35 specialists, who after seven years of research agreed to consider the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch within the Quaternary period.
Be it finally christened the Anthropocene or another name. Whether it is considered a geological period or a cultural period, without a doubt we are in a new, different, complex, very complex era, increasingly accelerated by technology and science. Perhaps speed does not allow us to stop to look around us.
The Polish philosopher Schopenhauer put it in his own way. "Man has made a hell for animals on Earth", a phrase issued two centuries ago, two hundred years in which we have done nothing about it but quite the opposite.
As long as we do not stop polluting the waters, soils and airs of the Earth; as long as we don't stop the killing of elephants to make ivory objects "with our clumsy hands"; as long as we continue to kill rhinos to strip them of their horns for supposed medicinal uses, just like shark fins; as long as we allow the extinction of species; as long as we continue uprooting millions of trees from the jungles to make furniture, houses or sheets of paper with their wood; As long as we do not stop bombarding the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, we cannot assume that we are sapiens.
These activities are undoubtedly the traces of the Anthropocene on Earth. If we do not eradicate them, they will become indelible and against ourselves. We are the last homos of several dozen branches that preceded us. They all died out. The last was Homo Neanderthalensis. Neither do we have a guarantee of survival. If we don't, then we really deserve the name Homo neo-ability. But let's bet that doesn't happen. We are well endowed with ordering the planet and there are many of us who are willing to do so.
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