Göbekli Tepe and the Impact of Excavations in the Anthropocene
Widening the Anthropocene debates
Since the Neolithization process, humans have relentlessly reshaped the planet to suit their needs. With industrialization in the 19the century and the detonations of atomic bombs since 1945, the anthropogenic impact on earth has become so severe, that the (not undisputed) concept of the Anthropocene has been proposed to follow the Holocene. The term was initially introduced by biologist Eugene F. Stroemer in the early 1980s and later popularized by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Crutzen 2002) to describe the irreversible and globally detectable effects of humans on earth. Changes in geological epochs are indicated by aGlobal Boundary Strato type Section and Point (GSSP) or“golden spike” that dene the base of a boundary within the Geological Time Scale (GTS).
