What is the time period of the “Holocene extinction”?

Scientists have identified six major extinction events, which are also called mass extinctions and biotic crises. Earth is now in what is called its “Holocene” epoch. The sixth, the Holocene extinction, is now underway. It is considered to be the result of human activity.

Each of Earth’s five previous mass extinctions was caused by natural factors, such as photosynthesis causing oxygenation, which killed species that oxygen poisoned. Other causes were global cooling, changing planetary chemistry, and “impactors”—objects like asteroids—crashing into Earth.

Since the beginning of the 20th Century, plant and animal extinctions have happened at 1,000 times the “background” or “normal” extinction rate for the planet. That is, the extinction rate that was normal between causes such as “impactors” hitting the planets and before human beings.

The current epoch started 11,700 years ago. It is part of the Quaternary period, which is about 2.59 million years old. The Holocene is considered to be a warm period between glacial ages, also called “ice ages”.

The epoch includes the growth of the human species, the development of civilizations, the clustering of humanity in urban areas, and the impacts of human actions on the surface of the earth and its atmosphere. Humanity’s ecology has been called a “global superpredator”, as Earth and all other living things on it have been “profoundly” changed by human beings.