Homogenocene: Defining the Age of Bio-cultural Devastation (1493–Present)

The entrance into the Anthropocene Epoch has pushed historians and social scientists to reconsider human history through new lenses and along an entirely differenttimeline. For historians, the notion of the Anthropocene can be seen as an overarching category superimposed on the usual chronological divisions into ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary history. In social sciences in general, the notion ofthe Anthropocene has been embraced, often critically, by enlarging its semantic fieldthrough a series of neologisms, which this article aims to analyze and contributeto. Originating from within stratigraphy and geology, the new coining for a (not yetofficial) epoch acts as a tectonic shift by bringing geology into history, as well asinto humanities and social sciences. Paradoxically, it could be said that humans arebeing “ejected from history” just as geology enriches itself with a human-centeredeponym, Anthropocene, that is, when specific actions carried out by a single biological species, homo sapiens, have spawned consequences so deep and everlasting thatan imprint upon the Earth’s stratigraphy has been impressed forever. These specificactions can be encapsulated in a single term: overconsumption, possibly accompanied by its twin dimension, overexploitation (of resources). This article sets out toidentify the period and sequence of events leading to the shift from consumption tooverconsumption and from exploitation to overexploitation. Identifying the momentthese transitions occurred is essential, as the double excess of “over” patterns hascharacterized what is commonly understood as the Anthropocene Epoch.