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Geologic Ages
Pleistocene Epoch

Topics covered in this section:

Introduction

The Pleistocene Epoch, which occurs in the latter part of the Cenozoic Era, covers a timeframe between 1.6 million and 10,000 years ago. That's a very long epoch and a lot happened during this period.

It was a time during which ice sheets waxed and waned, scraping across the continents in slow cadence, leaving valleys in their path.

And during the Pleistocene Epoch, a surprising find of recent years tells how the Earth tilted 180 degrees, effectively exchanging the North and South Poles. Imagine the catastrophic events that accompanied that flip!

And even more important, at least to us humans, is that the earliest humans arrived in Europe during the Pleistocene.

Brunhes/Matuyama Boundary

To advance theories about prehistoric events, geologists and climatologists often study mud cores extracted from the ocean floor.

At 1200 cm in the core labeled V20-238, scientists found a "boundary," which occurred when the north and south poles reversed their positions. The boundary occurs at 730,000 before the present (BP). In other words, the Earth completely flipped over some 730,000 years ago.

This boundary, named the Brunhes/Matuyama Boundary, is regarded as the division between the Lower and Middle Pleistocene.

Four or Eight Ice Ages?

Four Ice Age Model

In 1909 Penck and Bruckner proposed the theory that there had been four Ice Ages during the Pleistocene Epoch. However, recent mud cores extracted from the ocean floor, plus studies involving the ratio of Oxygen 16 versus Oxygen 18, tend to refute this "Four Ice Age" model.

Currently, scientists favor the "Eight Ice Age" model.

Eight Ice Age Model

Using the Brunhes/Matuyama boundary (see above), scientists tell us there have been eight full Ice Age cycles in the past 730,000 years. Initially, these cycles were completed every 70,000 years or so.

But after about 450,000 years ago, the cycles expanded during the last four Ice Ages so that they covered a span of 100,000 years per cycle. This change in cycle times may have had an immense impact on human settlement in Europe.

Recent Ice Age

Details about the landscape, as well as the flora and fauna (plant and animal life), of Europe are best known for the most recent Ice Age cycle:

• The most recent interglacial period occured about 130,000 years ago.
• This was followed by a gradual cooling, which created the most recent glacial maximum about 18,000 years ago.
• Finally, the most recent glacial retreat occurred about 10,000 years ago.

Using this last Ice Age as a rough guide for the previous cycles indicates that more than half of the time of an Ice Age cycle was neither a full glacial nor an interglacial. Instead, the majority of time in each cycle was somewhere in between.

We know that the extremes between the warm, forested interglacials and the arid, cold full glacials were comparatively short-lived. In both situations, herds of animals would have thrived, but particularly on the open steppes and tundra.

The prairie environment was ideal for herds of bison, horses, red deer, and aurochs. Following these herds would have been the abundant social carnivores such as lions, wolves, hyenas, and the huge cave bears.

The fauna existing during the last interglacial period included the woodland rhino, the straight-tusked elephant, the hippo, and the fallow deer. Then during the last glacial maximum, the fauna thinned out, being pinched between two ice sheets.

The last glacial retreat ended the Paleolithic, an archaeological era, and began the Mesolithic, another archaeological era. We'll cover these Stone Age eras, and other archaeological eras, in more detail in a later document. But first, let's introduce our human ancestors.

Arrival of Humans

The ebb and flow of environmental conditions roughly matched the ebb and flow of human populations.

Hominid Dispersion

The earliest hominids, dated to about 4 million years ago, have been found in east Africa. Genetic evidence points to the separation of hominids about a million years before that.

Between 2 and 4 million years ago, evidence suggests that hominids spread into eastern and southern Africa. This includes the so-called southern "ape men" and the australopithecines.

Then a little more than 1 million years ago, Homo erectus appeared outside of Africa. Their bones have been found in China and in Southeast Asia (Java).

Mediterranean Pioneers

A few nomadic pioneers from sub-Saharan Africa possibly reached the Mediterranean region some time between 1 million and 700,000 years ago. Of course, there have been claims of much older Mediterranean finds, dated between 1.0 and 1.8 million years ago. However:

• Habitation objects do exist, but no hominid remains have been found with the material.
• Only a few simple flakes and chopping tools similar to the stone tools from the Olduvai Gorge in east Africa have been found.
• Finds don't correlate with the pattern of hominids reaching China and Asia 1 million years ago.

Care must be taken when assigning an age based solely on the outdated notion of a gradual technological progression from simple to complex stone tools. Some finds, for example, that are dated by multiple methods at 1.6 million years old (e.g., Acheulean), contain "advanced" hand axes and cleavers, yet they precede later users of "primitive" stone tools.

European Pioneers

Isernia La Pineta, which lies southeast of Rome, is presently the earliest European site with abundant artifacts that have been cross-checked by different methods of absolute dating.

The site rests in a stratigraphic position just beneath a volcanic horizon in which the Brunhes/Matuyama boundary (see above) occurs. Potassium-Argon (K/Ar) dating confirms that the site is at least 730,000 years old.

Isernia is rich in fauna remains, but like so many other extremely old sites, contains no hominid remains.

The earliest European sites that contain hominid remains are about 400,000 years old. These hominids are no longer Homo erectus, but instead are Homo sapiens.

A few of the better known sites are Steinheim and Bilzingsleben in Germany, Petralona in Greece, and Swanscombe in England.

Skulls found at these sites range in age from 400,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Of course, for these wanderers to reach Europe from Africa, they had to travel through the Balkan Peninsula. And some of them must have walked across the land where present-day Romania sits.