by Elizabeth Kolbert

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2274

The Holocene - or "wholly recent" epoch - is what geologists call the 11,000 years or so since the end of the last ice age. As epochs go, the Holocene is barely out of diapers; its immediate predecessor, the Pleistocene, lasted more than two million years, while many earlier epochs, like the Eocene, went on for more than 20 million years. Still, the Holocene may be done for. People have become such a driving force on the planet that many geologists argue a new epoch - informally dubbed the Anthropocene - has begun.