Illustration of our method for measuring the formation age age_form, slope, number of maxima, and age of the first peak for an individual SFH drawn from the posterior distribution of each galaxy. The left panel shows two realisations of the SFH for the same galaxy from the COSMOS2020 catalogue (purple and cyan lines, smoothed with a Gaussian kernel with a standard deviation 100 Myr), together with the median over 50 realisations (grey line). The dashed vertical line indicates age_form, which was then used to compute the slope (solid straight segments). The circles indicate the position of the persistent maxima. The middle and right panels show the histograms of the numbers of maxima and slopes over 50 realisations.