What is the Pleistocene?
The Pleistocene is an epoch of the longer Neogene period. It extends from 1,808,000 to 11,550 years ago, when the Earth warmed up from its most recent glaciation. In terms of human progress, the end of the Pleistocene is also the boundary between the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic) to the Middle Stone Age (Mesolithic). The end of the Pleistocene is when modern humans emerged and basically took over the planet. The Pleistocene, like the rest of the Neogene, was a relatively cold time. The world experienced a cycle of glaciations, with highs like our current climate and lows where much of modern-day Canada, Europe, and Asia were under thousands of feet of ice. The Pleistocene featured many large mammalian fauna, such as mastodons, mammoths, the Dire Wolf, short-faced bear, cave bear, ground sloth, and many others. These are called megafauna, and it thought that humans made most of them extinct when they spread across the globe 100,000 – 30,000 years ago. The decline in megafauna fossils sync
Known also as the “Great Ice Age,” the Pleistocene is the geologic term for an epoch of the Quaternary period stretching from about 1.8 million to 12,000 years ago. The word “Pleistocene” derives from the Greek words “pleistos,” meaning most, and “ceno,” new. The first humans entered North America at the end of the Late Pleistocene when megafauna such as mammoth, cave lion, ground sloth, dire wolf, and giant bison still roamed the continent.
