Here's what the problem is with classifying human time after rock age

As scientists recognize that humans are now part of stratigraphy, perhaps we need to rethink our criteria in a way that separates geologic time from human time

Jurassic, Pleistocene, Precambrian. The named times in Earth’s history might inspire mental images of dinosaurs, trilobites or other enigmatic animals unlike anything in our modern world.

Labels like these are part of a system scientists use to divide up Earth’s 4.6 billion year history. The biggest divisions are eons which split into eras, which break into epochs, which divide into periods and then all the way down to ages.

Officially, we’re living in the Holocene epoch. Informally, people talk about our current age as the Anthropocene, melding humans with the lingo of geologic time. And now, there’s a new age with a