How to Fit Earth into History

In 2018, the United Nations IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) explicitly recognized Anthropocene science as the overarching framework for understanding all planetary change including climate change. Recent publications such as Zoltán Simon's History in Times of Unprecedented Change (2019) show that historians are now engaged in a similar intellectual exercise of exploring alternative frameworks for understanding the relationship between Earth history and human history. This paper briefly describes the emergence of the Anthropocene concept and argues that although Earth history and human history may be said to have merged, it does not follow that the practices of Earth System scientists and historians must merge.