The onset of the Anthropocene
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Many environmental scholars have used the Anthropocene designation to characterize socio-environmental relationships that significantly predate both the Industrial Revolution and the Great Acceleration.
“Unsurprisingly many environmental scholars have thus used the Anthropocene designation to characterize socio-environmental relationships that significantly predate both the Industrial Revolution and the Great Acceleration (Doughty et al., 2010; Certini and Scalenghe, 2011; Smith and Zeder, 2013; Beach et al., 2015; Lewis and Maslin, 2015; Boivin et al., 2016; Wagreich and Draganits, 2018).”
From A practical solution: the Anthropocene is a geological event, not a formal epoch (2022) · cites this paper as Smith and Zeder, 2013
Cites
Crutzen, P. J. (2002) · Nature · doi:10.1038/415023a · Cited by 4,788 · see citing works
The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives
Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P., & McNeill, J. (2011) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences · doi:10.1098/rsta.2010.0327 · Cited by 2,411 · see citing works
The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago
Ruddiman, W. F. (2003) · Climatic Change · doi:10.1023/b:clim.0000004577.17928.fa · Cited by 1,658 · cited 4× · see citing works
“They go on to conclude that this anthropogenic regional warming trend represents the onset of the Anthropocene: ‘‘Together, these results suggest that the human influence on climate began even earlier than previously believed (Ruddiman, 2003), and that the onset of the Anthropocene should be extended back many thousan…”
BackgroundInfluentialAnthropogenic transformation of the terrestrial biosphere
Ellis, E. C. (2011) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences · doi:10.1098/rsta.2010.0331 · Cited by 845 · see citing works
Fuller, D. Q., van Etten, J., Manning, K., Castillo, C., Kingwell-Banham, E., Weisskopf, A., Qin, L., Sato, Y.-I., & Hijmans, R. J. (2011) · The Holocene · doi:10.1177/0959683611398052 · Cited by 235 · see citing works
The Ultimate Ecosystem Engineers
Smith, B. D. (2007) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1137740 · Cited by 165 · see citing works
Self-citation
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal
Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C. N., Williams, M., Barnosky, A. D., Cearreta, A., Crutzen, P., Ellis, E., Ellis, M. A., Fairchild, I. J., Grinevald, J., et al. (2015) · Quaternary International · doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2014.11.045 · Cited by 784 · see citing works
Cultural evolutionary theory: How culture evolves and why it matters
Creanza, N., Kolodny, O., & Feldman, M. W. (2017) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.1620732114 · Cited by 482 · see citing works
The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of evidence and interim recommendations
Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C. N., Summerhayes, C. P., Wolfe, A. P., Barnosky, A. D., Cearreta, A., Crutzen, P., Ellis, E., Fairchild, I. J., Gałuszka, A., et al. (2017) · Anthropocene · doi:10.1016/j.ancene.2017.09.001 · Cited by 487 · see citing works
Can nuclear weapons fallout mark the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch?
Waters, C. N., Syvitski, J. P. M., Gałuszka, A., Hancock, G. J., Zalasiewicz, J., Cearreta, A., Grinevald, J., Jeandel, C., McNeill, J. R., Summerhayes, C., et al. (2015) · Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists · doi:10.1177/0096340215581357 · Cited by 213 · see citing works
Diachronous beginnings of the Anthropocene: The lower bounding surface of anthropogenic deposits
Edgeworth, M., deB Richter, D., Waters, C., Haff, P., Neal, C., & Price, S. J. (2015) · The Anthropocene Review · doi:10.1177/2053019614565394 · Cited by 181 · see citing works
Rose, N. L. (2015) · Environmental Science & Technology · doi:10.1021/acs.est.5b00543 · Cited by 178 · see citing works
The Anthropocene Divide: Obscuring Understanding of Social-Environmental Change
Bauer, A. M., & Ellis, E. C. (2018) · Current Anthropology · doi:10.1086/697198 · Cited by 127 · see citing works
A practical solution: the Anthropocene is a geological event, not a formal epoch
Gibbard, P. L., Bauer, A. M., Edgeworth, M., Ruddiman, W. F., Gill, J. L., Merritts, D. J., Finney, S. C., Edwards, L. E., Walker, M. J. C., Maslin, M., et al. (2022) · Episodes · doi:10.18814/epiiugs/2021/021029 · Cited by 100 · see citing works
A global doubling of dust emissions during the Anthropocene?
Hooper, J., & Marx, S. (2018) · Global and Planetary Change · doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2018.07.003 · Cited by 78 · see citing works
Members of the Anthropocene Working Group:, Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C. N., Barnosky, A. D., Cearreta, A., Edgeworth, M., Ellis, E. C., Gałuszka, A., Gibbard, P. L., Grinevald, J., et al. (2015) · The Anthropocene Review · doi:10.1177/2053019615587056 · Cited by 82 · see citing works
Three flaws in defining a formal ‘Anthropocene’
Ruddiman, W. F. (2018) · Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment · doi:10.1177/0309133318783142 · Cited by 77 · see citing works
Anthropogenic burning and the Anthropocene in late-Holocene California
Lightfoot, K. G., & Cuthrell, R. Q. (2015) · The Holocene · doi:10.1177/0959683615588376 · Cited by 34 · see citing works
- Authors
- Smith, B. D., & Zeder, M. A.
- Affiliations
- Smithsonian Institution (US)
- Corresponding author
- Smith, Bruce D.
- Venue
- Anthropocene
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2013-12
- Volume
- 4
- Pages
- 8-13
- ISSN
- 2213-3054 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1985390484
- Cited by
- 546
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 18 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 29 · 2023: 33 · 2022: 40 · 2021: 60 · 2020: 38 · 2019: 68 · 2018: 62 · 2017: 64 · 2016: 35 · 2015: 54 · 2014: 22 · 2013: 11
- FWCI
- 26.51
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Anthropocene (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Atmospheric Science › Geology and Paleoclimatology Research
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Paleontology › Archaeology and ancient environmental studies
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Atmospheric Science › Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution
- Keywords
- geological epochs, niche construction theory, anthropogenic impacts, plant domestication, animal domestication, agricultural transformation, Holocene, Pleistocene-Holocene boundary, golden spike, biostratigraphic markers, human-nature relationship
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
