An international team of researchers has identified a geological feature that, according to scientists, best reflects the proposed new era called the "Anthropocene". This is reported by The Guardian. The researchers clarified that the Holocene, the current epoch of the Earth, began after the end of the Ice Age, about 11.7 thousand years ago. In their opinion, in the middle of the XX century, the influence of mankind on the planet increased significantly, there was a shift, defined as a Great acceleration. This shift should be perceived, they added, as the beginning of a new era, the Anthropocene (the time of human domination). In order to confirm their conclusions, the scientists studied a variety of "natural archives" of the environment, in particular, they explored the coral reefs of Australia and peat bogs in Poland. In the end, experts noticed, the Canadian Lake Crawford was chosen. The layers of sediments at its bottom, which are located in a protected area and remain untouched by the outside world, record accurate data on the time during which they were deposited. Sediment cores from the lake, for example, show the presence of plutonium-239. This element hit the bottom due to nuclear weapons tests that have been conducted since the early 1950s.
The cold snap led to the fact that the ancient archanthropes (from the Greek words archaios – ancient and anthropos – man, the collective name of fossil people, considered as the oldest representatives of the human race) turned into modern humans Homo sapiens.
From the book by Tikhomirov A.E. When and why did man arise? LitRes, Moscow, 2023, p. 1: "Science has established that the fundamental difference between humans and animals occurred about a million years ago in South Africa. It was based on mutational processes that led to the fact that the protein packaging of DNA was rearranged in the areas associated with the development of the brain of the "zone of accelerated human development". These areas of the brain of ancient human ancestors happened to be next to enhancers – enhancers of gene activity, which became a turning point in the history of ancient people. But this accident was also a necessity that arose, in all probability, with the change of food consumed by ancient ancestors, it was the use of food cooked on fire that served as this impetus.