What is the name of the current geological epoch, generally dated from about 11,700 years ago?

The Holocene, beginning at the end of the last glacial period - and every civilisation, every crop, every city and all of written history sits inside it. It is a warm, unusually stable interval in a two-million-year pattern of ice ages, and agriculture appears in several places independently within a few thousand years of it starting, which is probably not a coincidence.

Technically it is not even a separate epoch so much as another interglacial like the dozens before it; it is given its own name largely because we are in it. It was subdivided in 2018 into three ages, the most recent of which is dated from a drought 4,200 years ago recorded in a stalagmite in India.

Whether it has ended is the argument. The Anthropocene was proposed for a new epoch defined by human alteration of the planet - plutonium from nuclear tests, plastics, concrete, fly ash and nitrogen from fertiliser all leave a clean global signal in sediment. A working group spent fifteen years on it and recommended a start date of 1952 and a lake in Canada as the reference site; in March 2024 the parent commission voted the proposal down. The term stays in wide use outside stratigraphy regardless.