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The period since 1950 has brought "the most rapid transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind". [106] Through 2018, humans have reduced forest area by ~30% and grasslands/shrubs by ~68%, to make way for livestock grazing and crops for humans. [107]
An early concept for the Anthropocene was the Noosphere by Vladimir Vernadsky, who in 1938 wrote of "scientific thought as a geological force". [17] Scientists in the Soviet Union appear to have used the term Anthropocene as early as the 1960s to refer to the Quaternary, the most recent geological period.
It is the sovereign state with the shortest history of human settlement (followed by Mauritius). [122] East Pacific: Floreana Island: 1805: Black Beach: First settled 1805–1809 by Patrick Watkins. Later attempts in 1837, 1893, 1925, and 1929. [123] South Atlantic: Tristan da Cunha: 1810: First settled by Jonathan Lambert and two other men ...
Human history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers.They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread across Earth's continental land except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago.
Mass extinctions are characterized by the loss of at least 75% of species within a geologically short period of time (i.e., less than 2 million years). [18] [51] The Holocene extinction is also known as the "sixth extinction", as it is possibly the sixth mass extinction event, after the Ordovician–Silurian extinction events, the Late Devonian extinction, the Permian–Triassic extinction ...
The modern human's waking day is 16 hours, while many mammals are only awake for half as many hours. [46] Additionally, humans are most awake during the early evening hours, while other primates' days begin at dawn and end at sundown. Many of these behavioral changes can be attributed to the control of fire and its impact on daylight extension ...
Studies show that the pre-modern migration of human populations begins with the movement of Homo erectus out of Africa across Eurasia about 1.75 million years ago. Homo sapiens appeared to have occupied all of Africa about 150,000 years ago; some members of this species moved out of Africa 70,000 years ago (or, according to more recent studies, as early as 125,000 years ago into Asia, [1] [2 ...
Cave paintings (such as this one from France) represent a benchmark in the evolutionary history of human cognition. Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin was the first to propose the out-of-Africa hypothesis for the peopling of the world, [39] but the story of prehistoric human migration is now understood to be much more complex thanks to twenty-first-century advances in genomic sequencing.