The Pleistocene is a geologic epoch within the Quaternary Period, spanning roughly 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, characterized by repeated glacial–interglacial cycles driven by orbital (Milankovitch) forcing and associated feedbacks in the climate system. It encompasses major expansions of continental ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere, large sea-level fluctuations, and pronounced shifts in atmospheric composition and global temperature. Stratigraphically, its base is defined near the Gauss–Matuyama magnetic reversal, and its end is marked by the transition to the Holocene following the last glacial termination. The Pleistocene is critical for understanding late Cenozoic climate dynamics and associated environmental changes.
Some tropical land regions may warm more dramatically than previously predicted, as climate change progresses, according to a new CU Boulder study that looks millions of years into Earth's past. Using lake sediments from ...
Earth Sciences
Feb 2, 2026
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Australian and New Zealand scientists have unearthed the remains of ancient wildlife in a cave near Waitomo on Aotearoa's North Island, the first time a large number of million-year-old fossils have been found—including ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Jan 28, 2026
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169
Researchers at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) have led a study, recently published in the Journal of Human Evolution, on the diet of individuals at the Sima de los Huesos site (Sierra ...
Evolution
Jan 27, 2026
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Researchers from the Center for Paleogenetics have managed to analyze the genome from a 14,400-year-old woolly rhinoceros, recovered from a tissue sample found preserved inside the stomach of an ancient wolf.
Molecular & Computational biology
Jan 14, 2026
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179
A research team led by Associate Professor Wang Yaqiong from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS), in collaboration with colleagues from multiple domestic and international ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Jan 2, 2026
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An international team of scientists, including the University of Wollongong (UOW), has found compelling evidence that a changing climate played a role in the extinction of the early human species Homo floresiensis, also known ...
Ecology
Dec 27, 2025
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262
If you've seen any of the "Ice Age" animated Disney movies, we have some bad news: You don't know the real ice age.
Paleontology & Fossils
Nov 26, 2025
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Approximately 400,000 years ago, some areas of Greenland that are now covered by a thick layer of ice were exposed to fresh air and sunlight. Today, the Greenland Ice Sheet covers most of the land mass, but the southwestern ...
Environment
Nov 25, 2025
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21
A study by research teams at the National Museum of Natural Science and National Taiwan University has, for the first time, unveiled Taiwan's vanished Pleistocene ecosystem: a warm, arid savanna environment dominated by grasslands ...
Ecology
Nov 5, 2025
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149
An explorer and a glaciologist have embarked on a three-month mission to cross part of Antarctica on kite skis in search of ice that is 130,000 years old.
Earth Sciences
Nov 1, 2025
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