A meeting with an international team of geologists, climate scientists, and ecologists will be held to decide if the planet has moved on from the Holocene epoch of the past 11,700 years and into the Anthropocene epoch, to reflect the environmental impact of humankind on Earth.

According to Tech Times, the team known as the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), which has been examining the topic since 2009, will meet in Berlin, Germany on Oct. 23 and 24 for the first time as a group. The team will make their decision and pass their recommendation along to the International Geological Congress, which can officially determine if a new epoch should be declared.

Tech Times reports that humans began establishing dominance on Earth around the end of the last Ice Age, but the effects of civilization has become more noticeable in the last 200 years.

“What we see is the urban phenomenon and the boom of China has a direct marking in the forms of the strata,” said John Palmesino, a London-based architect who helped capture the impact of humans on film, in a recent statement. “You can no longer distinguish what is man-made from what is natural.”

Reuters reports that the International Geological Congress defines the geological timescale units of Earth, the longest of which are periods and followed by epochs and ages. The recommendation of the AWG to the Congress is scheduled for Aug. 2016.

The planet’s current age, the Holocene epoch, started over 11,000 years ago. Human civilization has certainly affected the environment on Earth, such as the release of greenhouse gases leading to global climate change.

“It is clear that, though we have differences about when it starts, it seems as a group that we were quite happy to say we are in the Anthropocene,” said Colin Waters, AWG secretary and geologist for the British Geological Society.