Prelude to the Anthropocene: Two new North American Land Mammal Ages (NALMAs)
Open accessAbstract
Human impacts have left and are leaving distinctive imprints in the geological record. Here we show that in North America, the human-caused changes evident in the mammalian fossil record since c. 14,000 years ago are as pronounced as earlier faunal changes that subdivide Cenozoic epochs into the North American Land Mammal Ages (NALMAs). Accordingly, we define two new North American Land Mammal Ages, the Santarosean and the Saintagustinean, which subdivide Holocene time and complete a biochronologic system that has proven extremely useful in dating terrestrial deposits and in revealing major features of faunal change through the past 66 million years. The new NALMAs highlight human-induced changes to the Earth system, and inform the debate on whether or not defining an Anthropocene epoch is justified, and if so, when it began.
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Human influence on the Earth system was small compared to what has happened since the mid-20th century up to 12,000 B.P.
“To this point human influence on the Earth system was small compared to what has happened since the mid-20th century; even so, human impacts contributed to the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna ( 17 ).”
From The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene (2016) · cites this paper as [17]
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References 73 · Cited by 90
- Authors
- Barnosky, A. D., Holmes, M., Kirchholtes, R., Lindsey, E., Maguire, K. C., Poust, A. W., Stegner, M. A., Sunseri, J., Swartz, B., Swift, J., Villavicencio, N. A., & Wogan, G. O.
- Affiliations
- Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (US)
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- University of California, Merced (US)
- ORCID
- Venue
- The Anthropocene Review
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2014-09-09
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 225-242
- ISSN
- 2053-0196 (ISSN-L)
- 2053-020X
- OpenAlex
- W2115286557
- Cited by
- 90
- References
- 73
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 8 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 2
- FWCI
- 3.41
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- escholarship.org
- Locations
- The Anthropocene Review (publishedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Paleontology › Evolution and Paleontology Studies
- Physical Sciences › Earth and Planetary Sciences › Atmospheric Science › Geology and Paleoclimatology Research
- Social Sciences › Anthropology › Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology
- Keywords
- Anthropocene, North American Land Mammal Ages, faunal change
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