The time we're in now, called the Holocene, which is the last 11,600 years, is the calmest for humanity on record.
I'll tell you why...
But firstly, why am I interested in this stuff? Makes no sense. I've written 7 books around this topic, and yes, I just spent a few seconds counting how many books in my head.
Okay, so, science says humans have been around for about 300,000 years. Sure. But, even that number is new. Before 2017, the textbooks said 200,000, and like always, science said it was settled, even though science shouldn't consider itself a religion anymore and come to the fact that science is never, ever, ever settled. That's not the point in science.
Anyway, back to this.
In 2017, fossils in Morocco dated us — humans — back a hundred thousand years overnight. From 200,000 years to 315,000 years. Nobody knows what the next find will do to the number. We could be older still, and they think they've discovered an older version of us in 2025...
So, anyway, take 300,000 years as the marker. We had the same brains and hands and feet. Probably better IQ's back then, too, simply because they learned in a different way than we learn now, and chemicals and additives and adjuvants weren't added into their foods, yet. That comes 299,925 years later.
Okay, so, before what we're in now, the Holocene Era, was what's called the Pleistocene Era. During that era, there were temperature swings unlike anything we've ever seen. Ice cores from Greenland show the climate jumping several degrees inside a single lifetime. Not over centuries. Inside one lifetime. You could be born in one climate and die in another.
In the Pleistocene, floods unlike anything we've ever seen. When the ice sheets broke up, the meltwater raised the oceans hundreds of feet. There were stretches where the sea rose fifty feet in a few centuries and swallowed coastlines. Ice dams burst and sent walls of water 500 ft to 1,000 ft tall and across entire regions, scouring the land down to bedrock. Whatever was in the way is under the ocean now, or scraped clean off the map, or became nothing but mud and soot, and mud and soot, along with more mud and soot.
Our ancestors stood in the middle of that, and with what they witnessed, what they overcame, it brought us to an era that finally had some peace, had relative jumps in degrees, but nothing like a 10 degree shift in a handful of years, which happened around 11,700 years ago, when the Younger Dryas snapped shut.
Now, this calm stretch we live in, the last 11,600 years or so, isn't the first one, though. We've had others. The planet always has warm windows between ice ages. Around 125,000 years ago, before the last ice age, there was another warm age, and it was a stable age, like ours, and it lasted a bit longer than the current interglacial age we're in now. It actually ran warmer than today, too, which means more green on the planet, healthier people, and lush forests, food, and the like.
During that time, hippos swam in the Thames River, in England. Sea levels sat higher than ours, and modern humans were alive, farming (science says no on the farming, I say yes), building, moving, swimming, you name it. Anywhere people would have settled back then, near rivers, near the sea, is exactly where the water rushed into and took over. If anybody planted a field or stacked stones into a wall during that older warm window, the evidence has been underwater or under ice for a hundred thousand years, turned to dust by now, so simply saying the absence of evidence is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in that story. Just like the same textbooks that said 200,000 years, until they found something to change their minds.
Through all of this, the climate has swung hard before, and by a lot, and with humans experiencing every bit of it, and I wish we could understand that the calm — and yes, climatologists and geologists say the Holocene is the most peaceful in terms of climate and earth movement during humanity's time — we're in now is rare, and it's old, and the people before us got no such gift.
So when I hear people say the climate is changing, I don't argue because it is. We live in a cycle, and it's just how it is. After every ice age comes the ice melting age, and before every ice building age (another ice age), ice melts so much until it forces — in geological terms that I don't want to describe for sake of boredom — everything to reverse course, and Earth builds ice again, sending us back into the ice age for another 100,000-ish years, where food is scarcer, where farming (cold brings down CO2 to a near plant extinction level) is nearly impossible.
What I'd add is this, though. Our ancestors watched the worst of the worst in geological terms, massive, massive floods, massive, massive solar episodes, massive, massive land loss, and I could keep going with this 'massive' thing.
And here we are, in the gentlest stretch of weather our species has ever known, and we've used it really well. We've created cities, farming, writing, and more, and all in this one warm window, which happens to be the calmest window in a long, long time.
The thing is, the window won't stay open forever. No window does. And I'm not saying that to scare anybody, because we live in a wild world, one we're built for, if that makes sense. Every single one of us descends from people who had experienced thousand-foot walls of water, ten-degree swings, coastlines vanishing under the sea, experienced five continents burning at the same time (and there's hard evidence for it, which the textbooks hate), and made it through, by working and leaning on each other, and that's the only way any of us got here — by having each other's backs, by working with each other, and by leaning on one another.
Humanity is a beast. We're incredible. We've been through the worst shit, and came out the other side, more so than any other hominid out there. We're special. We're incredible. And time and time again, when it seemed like the end of the world, we came together, and pulled through, and made it a better world, one tiny, itty-bitty step at a time.
