Why did Charles Lyell use the term Recent for the most recent part of geologic time?

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Quaternary paleogeography — Quaternary Distribution of landmasses, mountainous regions, shallow seas, and deep ocean basins during the Quaternary Period. Included in the paleogeographic reconstruction are the locations of the interval's subduction zones.

In 1833, the British geologist Charles Lyell proposed the term "Recent" to designate the period of geologic time that has elapsed since the Earth became "tenanted by man."1

Lyell’s classification was rooted in his uniformitarian approach to geology, which emphasized that natural processes observed today are the same as those that operated in the past. While the term was intended to capture the era of human presence, it is now known that humans have existed for a much longer duration than Lyell originally estimated. The term "Recent" was eventually superseded in formal scientific nomenclature by the Holocene Epoch, which was proposed in 1867 and formally adopted to describe the latest interval of Earth's history.231