My friend Chuck wrote a fascinating post yesterday about time and history and the movement of man through the ages, and he broke down what exactly AGES means. And I felt kind of ashamed, not because I didn’t know what the words meant, but because I’ve never really thought about them, in-depth. Me! Who loves language and linguistics and can spend hours delving into the fine print of dictionaries. I had never really thought about the fact that these words AREN’T actually interchangeable, although I’m certainly not alone in using them as if they were.
Eons are subdivided into, in descending order, eras, periods, epochs, and ages.
Now I’m going to paraphrase and copy the heck out of Chuck’s post to make my OWN post sound much smarter and because it made me think so much about this subject.
Essentially, the life of the earth (roughly 4.5 billion years old) has been divided into four eons, which have varying lengths, delimited by events. We are currently in the Phanerozoic EON, which started with the first hard-shelled creatures appearing. Within that, we are currently in the Cenozoic ERA, which began with the end of the dinosaurs. Within that, we are currently in the Quaternary PERIOD beginning a period of glaciation that has not ended, a true Ice Age that we’re still in. Inside that period we are currently in the Holocene EPOCH, which began when the last “Ice Age” ended (confusing, I know, but it’s because we’re currently in an interglacial state). And within that, we are in the Meghalayan AGE, which began with a great drought which lasted for TWO centuries and messed up everything for, well, simply ages.
Got all that?
EON – Phanerozoic
ERA – Cenozoic
PERIOD – Quaternary
EPOCH – Holocene
AGE – Meghalayan
All of these are based on breaking down TIME. So, for example, they don’t have anything to do with the 3-stage (or 5 or 6, depending on who you ask) periods such as Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age. One of Chuck’s commenters made the point that most of the words in that list above are ones we typically encounter in crossword puzzles and she wasn’t wrong. I don’t use the words eon or era or epoch much outside of crossword puzzles, and most of the time the clues that lead to them could lead to ANY of those words: “a long time”, “a very long time”, “years and years”, “ages and ages”. HA!
We say “O! It’s been AGES since we met!” when what we mean is a long time. It’s been EONS. Simply forever! These types of time periods are really too vast for us to comprehend on any kind of human scale. They last, well, simply AGES.
The Meghalayan started 4200 years ago. The Holocene started 11,700 years ago. The Quaternary began 2.58 million years ago. The Cenozoic covers history beginning 66 million years ago. And the Phanerozoic covers the time period from 538.8 million years ago to the present. That’s crazy!
Anthropocene is a term that has been used to refer to the period of time during which humanity has become a planetary force of change, starting in around 1950. It was originally a proposal for a new geological epoch following the Holocene, but was rejected in 2024 by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), according to Wikipedia. The Holocene itself corresponds with the rapid proliferation, growth, and impacts of the human species worldwide, including all of its written history, technological revolutions, development of major civilizations, and overall significant transition towards urban living in the present, so it pretty much covers what the proposed Anthropocene was trying to get across. It’s scary and upsetting to think about how much time has passed since the beginning of the Phanerozoic Eon to now and how humanity is managing to completely crash so much of the systems on Earth that time has spent, well, simply AGES, building.
I’m sure there will be a new age, no matter whether it contains humanity or not. Time will tell, I guess. Literally.
Mood: thoughtful
Music: Daya—Drift Away
This was fun! I was just giving my grandson a list of things we didn’t know when I was a child (the Big Bang, how the dinosaurs died, etc.). I just found out that even though it seemed obvious by the 16th century that South America and Africa fit nicely together and that the continents were once closer to each other, nobody believed seriously in continental drift because they didn’t learn about plate tectonics until the mid-1950s! Blew me away to find that out. So cool to learn stuff like this
It is cool! thank you for sparking this post!