I do recommend you read The Human Planet: How we Created the Anthropocene as I find it enthralling. But anyone who has read any of my blogs will understand my enthusiasm for this material so well put together to provide evidence of scientific markers which only human endeavours could have made. So here are some extracts to whet your appetite:

…….In response, we present a simple method to arrive at a start date for the Anthropocene. Having established that Earth is moving towards a new state, we look to geological sediments to define an epoch, just as past epochs in Earth’s history have been defined. A specific chemical or biological change in a geological sediment needs to be
chosen to signal the beginning of a new human-influenced layer of sediment. This marker must also be correlated with changes in other sediments worldwide. Called a ‘golden spike’, the marker says: after this point Earth is moving towards a new state. We sift through the various golden spikes that have been proposed. Our analysis concludes that the earliest date when these geological criteria are met is the year 1610, marked by a short-lived but pronounced dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide captured in an Antarctic ice-core, reaching its lowest level in this year. Called the Orbis Spike, from the Latin for ‘world’, it marks when the Columbian Exchange can be seen in geological sediments.
Much of the drop occurred because Europeans carried smallpox and other diseases to the Americas for the first time, leading to the deaths of more than 50 million people over a few decades. The collapse of these societies led to farmland returning to forest over such an extensive area that the growing trees……..

The Human Planet: How we Created the Anthropocene by Lewis and Maslin

…………Creating a Super-Interglacial In Chapter 4 we saw that the conversion of natural vegetation to farmland adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, offsetting the expected decline in carbon dioxide through the Holocene as the interglacial continued. This provided unusual stability to Earth’s global average temperature and other climatic conditions. Farming delayed the onset of the next ice age and gave more time for complex civilizations to form……..

…………in Chapter 5 we saw that the cessation of farming across the Americas temporarily did the reverse, causing a century of globally cooler climatic conditions, with widespread adverse impacts on many cultures. These changes were modest compared to the rise in carbon dioxide following the increasingly widespread use of coal and other fossil fuels. The Industrial Revolution, over time, has created conditions that have not been experienced in the 200,000-year span of anatomically modern human existence. Fossil fuel use has created a super-interglacial……….

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During the Industrial Revolution carbon dioxide levels rose from about 280 ppm at its inception to 404 ppm in 2016, some 0.6 ppm per year, another order of magnitude increase. To put this in a wider geological context, the change in atmospheric carbon dioxide between the last glacial maximum and the beginning of the Holocene was about 80 ppm……..

Since the Industrial Revolution human actions have been changing the global carbon cycle faster than it changed coming out of an ice age, and since the 1950s, at ten or more times that rate. By adding 2.2 trillion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, from both fossil fuels and converting more farmland, there is now more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than has been seen for at least 800,000 years, and possibly several million years. 28 The majority of these additions have been in the past fifty years. There is clear evidence that these anthropogenic greenhouse gases are changing our climate………