A recent crossword puzzle clue asking for the eon we inhabit made me realize that I didn’t know much about terms for times. It has become fashionable to say ours is the anthropocene era, with “anthropo” being the word for human, like anthropology is the study of humans, and “cene” being a word for a time stretch, though it literally means “new” in Greek. This is supposed to be a way to impress upon the word’s users the gravity of the fact that human activity is measurably changing the atmosphere at the planetary scale, per its coiners, Eugene Stormer and Paul Crutzen, a biologist and a chemist who came up with it in 2000. I dislike the word partly because I am actually optimistic about humanity’s ability to “solve” (that is: both mitigate and adapt to) climate change and also because I think the residents of any given epoch are unlikely to know from the inside it what it will look like in retrospect.
But all this got me thinking about these words, such as “Jurassic” and “paleo.” Where do they come from? They are, apparently, from something called geochronological time, through which we have chunked up the entire lifespan of Earth, some 4.54 billion years. Eons are longer than eras, which are longer than periods, which are longer than epochs. The shortest little ones are called ages, just a trifling few million years long. Are you ready to memorize your address? The name of the time you live in is, according to the International Union of Geological Sciences, as follows: the Phanerozoic eon, Cenozoic era, Quaternary period, Holocene epoch, Meghalayan age. Ages in geologic time are, of course, distinct from historical ages, like the Iron Age, which are something like a thousand years long.
Our eon means the one where you can find animals, as “phanero” means evident and “zoic” means pertaining to animals (think “zoo”). Our epoch, the Holocene, translates to “whole” (holo) and “new” (cene), which I think is charmingly slangy. Our age, the Meghalayan, is named after a state of northeastern India accessible to the rest of the country only by slipping through a narrow gap between Nepal and Bangladesh. Meghalaya means “Abode of the Clouds,” and it is a Himalayan area where researchers found a stalagmite in the Mawmluh cave, over 4,200 feet above sea level, and determined by studying it that a new geologic age had begun during a centuries-long drought only a few millennia ago.
Most of the geochronological stretches of time are words for places, toponyms, where the fossils or rocks that we date them to were discovered. Jurassic Park may be set “120 miles west of Costa Rica,” but the word “Jurassic” in “Jurassic period” refers to the Jura Mountains along the French-Swiss border — not to be confused with the whiskey-producing Scottish island of Jura in the Outer Hebrides, where George Orwell wrote 1984. Strangely enough, the Swiss-French area was named for an ancient Celtic word meaning forest. It was there that rocks of that time were first studied in the 1800s, and it remains a rich area for finding dinosaur bones and tracks. The Cambrian Period is when shells evolved, so it left interesting rocks. They were first studied by Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison in 1835 in Wales, which the Romans called Cambria. If that seems provincial, think about this: In 1834, German geologists named the Triassic Period of Earth because they had found there were three (tri) types of rocks, but they didn’t bother to check if that was Earth-wide or just German. It was just German. But we continue to have that word for 50.6 million years of planetary history.
“Paleo,” a term that is also associated with dinosaurs, certain conservatives, and dieters who like steak but not hamburgers, is not a toponym. “Paleo” just means old. The paleocene epoch, if you remember what “cene” means and put things together, is then a very weird term: It means the “old new time.”
Sometimes etymology helps you make sense of the words we use. Sometimes it reminds you that the development of language is a giant, chaotic accident that takes place over a tiny speck of time that, to us, feels very long.
Best wishes for a good Meghalayan.
