Climate stage· The columns of time

MIS 8

300 ka → 243 ka

Marine isotope stage 8, from 300,000 to 243,000 years ago, is a glacial stage of fifty-seven millennia from which few human remains have been recovered.

Marine isotope stage 8, a glacial stage of fifty-seven millennia during which the species exists but has left few recovered remains.

What the evidence shows

These 57 millennia are nearly empty of documentation. Between the oldest known fossils and the first well-documented occupations, the archaeological record thins, and that thinning informs as much on conditions of preservation as on settlement. Two causes combine. Cold stages lower sea level, so that the coastlines of the period, and the occupations that lay on them, are today submerged under several tens of metres of water. A second, general cause is taphonomic bias, that is, the set of processes that destroy remains after their abandonment: a site must survive erosion, the shifting of watercourses, the reworking of soil by fauna and agricultural work, and each additional millennium constitutes an occasion for destruction. Ancient traces are therefore mechanically rarer than recent ones, independently of human numbers.

Bounds and conventions

An empty band is ambiguous by construction: it may mean that little happened, that little survived or that little has been sought. The last two explanations account for most of the present case, and graphic representation does not distinguish them.

Glacial stage.