Age· The columns of time

Late Pleistocene

129 ka → 11.7 ka

The last hundred and twenty thousand years of the ice ages: our species leaves Africa, settles the last habitable continents, and paints.

What the evidence shows

It opens at the onset of the last interglacial, about 129,000 years ago, and closes with the retreat of the last ice sheets. Genomes from a hundred and forty-two populations place the great expansion out of Africa between sixty and forty thousand years ago, followed shortly by mixing with Neanderthals. On a wall in Sulawesi, at least 51,200 years ago, someone painted three human-like figures around a wild pig, placed so that they read as acting together: the oldest narrative scene known. Large mammals disappear continent by continent, and the losses are heaviest where people arrived last. And the thaw is not smooth: about 12,900 years ago the North Atlantic returns to near-glacial cold within decades and stays there for more than a thousand years. The Holocene begins when that last cold spell, the Younger Dryas, breaks.

Bounds and conventions

Alone among the Pleistocene subseries it still has no golden spike: its base is fixed by convention at the onset of the last interglacial rather than by a section, and the subseries themselves were only formally ratified in 2021. Whether the megafauna were killed by people or by climate is still argued, though the broadest global analysis points to people. What triggered the Younger Dryas remains open.

Provisional: the base has no GSSP yet, and the figure of about 129 ka is indicative.

Sources

1. Cohen, K. M., Finney, S. C., Gibbard, P. L., Fan, J.-X. (2013). The ICS International Chronostratigraphic Chart. Episodes 36(3), 199–204, mise à jour continue, voir Cohen et al. (2025), Episodes.
2. Head, M. J., Pillans, B., Zalasiewicz, J. A. (2021). Formal ratification of subseries for the Pleistocene Series of the Quaternary System. Episodes 44(3), 241–247.
3. Bergström et al. (2021), Nature · Origins of modern human ancestry
4. Oktaviana et al. (2024), Nature · Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago
5. Sandom et al. (2014), Proceedings of the Royal Society B · Global late Quaternary megafauna extinctions linked to humans, not climate change
6. Bakke et al. (2009), Nature Geoscience · Rapid oceanic and atmospheric changes during the Younger Dryas cold period