Epoch· The columns of time

Holocene

11.7 ka → Today

Eleven thousand seven hundred years of unusual climatic calm, in which farming, cities and writing all appear.

What the evidence shows

Its base is defined in a Greenland ice core at 11,700 years before 2000, one of only two boundaries on the whole chart fixed in ice rather than rock. What distinguishes it is steadiness: no glacial cycle, and temperature swings an order of magnitude smaller than those the Pleistocene ran on. That steadiness is the condition of everything that follows, because a field is only worth clearing if the climate will still suit it in twenty years. By 11,500 years ago at the latest, people across the Fertile Crescent are managing plants and animals that are still wild in shape, and the changes to seed and bone by which archaeologists recognise domestication arrive long after the practice itself. Its three ages, though, are cut on climate and not on anything human: the first runs from the thaw, the second opens on a cold snap of some 8,200 years ago, the third on a drought 4,250 years before 2000.

Bounds and conventions

The base is precisely defined. The top is the present, or so the chart says: a proposal to close the epoch in the mid-twentieth century and open an Anthropocene series was formally considered and rejected. Its own subdivision is unusual, and was criticised on that ground, since each of its three boundaries is cut on a climatic event read from a single archive.

Base at the NGRIP2 core GSSP, 11,700 years b2k.

Sources

1. Cohen, K. M., Finney, S. C., Gibbard, P. L., Fan, J.-X. (2013). The ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart. Episodes 36(3), 199–204, mise à jour continue, voir Cohen et al. (2025), Episodes.
2. Walker, M., Head, M. J., Berkelhammer, M., et al. (2018). Formal ratification of the subdivision of the Holocene Series/Epoch: two new GSSPs and three new stages/subseries. Episodes 41(4), 213–223.
3. Zeder (2011), Current Anthropology · The origins of agriculture in the Near East
4. Kröpelin et al. (2008), Science · Climate-driven ecosystem succession in the Sahara: the past 6000 years
5. Matero et al. (2017), Earth and Planetary Science Letters · The 8.2 ka cooling event caused by Laurentide ice saddle collapse