Age· The columns of time

Late Pleistocene

129 ka → 11.7 ka

The Late Pleistocene, from 129,000 to 11,700 years ago, covers the last glaciations, in which Homo sapiens left Africa, reached the last habitable continents and made the first narrative images.

Last subdivision of the Pleistocene, covering the final hundred and twenty millennia of the glaciations, in which Homo sapiens leaves Africa, reaches the last habitable continents and produces the first narrative images.

What the evidence shows

It opens at the beginning of the last interglacial, the Eemian, around 129,000 years, and closes with the retreat of the last ice sheets. The genomes of a hundred and forty-two populations place the major expansion out of Africa between sixty and forty thousand years, followed closely by admixture with Neanderthals. On a wall at Sulawesi, at least 51,200 years ago, three human-like figures are arranged around a wild pig so as to interact with it: the oldest known narrative scene. Large mammals disappear continent after continent, the losses being heaviest where humans arrived latest. Deglaciation is not steady: around 12,900 years, the North Atlantic returns within decades to near-glacial cold and remains there for more than a thousand years. The Holocene begins when that last cold episode, the Younger Dryas, ends.

Bounds and conventions

Alone among the Pleistocene subseries, this one has no golden spike: its base is fixed by convention at the beginning of the last interglacial and not by a section. The subseries themselves were formally ratified only in 2021. The respective contributions of hunting and climate to the loss of the megafauna remain debated, the broadest global analysis pointing to human arrival. The cause of the Younger Dryas is not established.

Provisional: the base is not yet defined by a GSSP, and the ~129 ka figure is indicative.