We have left the Holocene and entered the Anthropocene
The core idea stands, but key numbers or details have changed.
TaughtHuman activity has pushed Earth out of the Holocene and into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, defined by our impact on the planet. It is the epoch we now live in.
NowIn March 2024 the scientific bodies that name geological time formally rejected the proposal to add the Anthropocene as an epoch. Officially, we are still in the Holocene. "Anthropocene" survives as a useful informal term, not a unit on the geological timescale.
What actually happened
The idea took off after 2000 and became near-ubiquitous in classrooms, museums, and headlines: the Anthropocene, the age of humans. A working group spent fifteen years building the formal case and even chose a golden-spike reference site, Crawford Lake in Canada, whose sediments record the mid-twentieth-century surge in nuclear fallout and fossil-fuel traces.
In March 2024 the relevant subcommission of the International Commission on Stratigraphy voted it down, 12 to 4, and the parent union upheld the result. The objection was largely technical: an epoch is a long unit, and a boundary drawn at around 1950 defines something far too thin and too recent to sit beside the Holocene or the Pleistocene.
This is not a claim that humans are not reshaping the planet, and the geologists who voted no do not dispute that they are. It is narrower: the Anthropocene was never ratified as a formal epoch, and in 2024 that door was closed. If a textbook told you we officially live in the Anthropocene, the official answer is that, on the geological chart, you don't.
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Who was taught this
Still standard through 2024, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2024 learned the earlier version.