The vote, which a committee of around two dozen scholars held in February, brought an end to nearly 15 years of debate about whether to declare that our species had transformed the natural world so thoroughly since the 1950s as to have sent the planet into a new epoch of geologic time.

So, 24 people.

With the Anthropocene issue behind them, the keepers of the geologic timeline can now turn to other matters. Next on their agenda, among other things, is deciding precisely when the late Pleistocene epoch began.

Thank god we can finally get to the really important issues.