1 Million BC - 3300BC (D)
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1Mil BC Ascension Island, the top of a volcano, broke through the surface of the Atlantic Ocean about this time. Since then the island has grown to about 100 square km.
(Econ, 12/18/10, p.159)
1Mil BC DNA evidence in 2008 suggested that the black rat originated in South-East Asia about this time and then split into 6 lines, one of which colonized India and the Middle East and then spread to Europe.
(Econ, 3/15/08, p.97)
1Mil BC The Jaramillo event occurred and serves as a paleomagnetic marker. In 1982 William Glen authored “The Road to Jaramillo: Critical Years of the Revolution in Earth Science." The book's title comes from the Jaramillo magnetic event discovered in rocks from Jaramillo Creek in the Jemez Mountains in New Mexico.
(PacDis., Spg. 96, p.46)(www.asa3.org/ASA/book_reviews/12-92.htm)
1Mil BC A homo erectus skull from Daka, Ethiopia, from this time was identified in 2001 as an ancestor to all modern humans. Tim D. White and Berhani Asfaw led the team that discovered the fossils in 1997.
(SFC, 3/21/02, p.A1)
1Mil BC Homo erectus arrived in Java about this time. In 1891 Eugene Dubois, Dutch health officer, discovered the skull of a human in Java, Indonesia that he named Pithecanthropus erectus [Java Man]. The first Homo erectus skullcap was found near Trinil, Java.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.434)(RFH-MDHP, p.153)(SFC, 12/13/96, p.A4)(SFC, 11/14/00, p.A9)
1Mil BC A Grand Canyon lava dam created a lake larger than Lake Mead and Lake Powell combined. It extended from Toroweap Canyon back through Lake Powell to beyond Moab, Utah-- a distance of more than 400 miles.
(NH, 9/97, p.39)
1Mil BC The mean residence time for the water in Lake Vostok was one million years as compared to 6 years for Lake Ontario. Scientists in 1999 discovered living bacteria and theorized that the lake was warmed either by hot magma beneath the Earth's crust or by the downward pressure of ice.
(SFC, 12/11/99, p.A2)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok)
c1Mil BC The Haleakala volcano created the eastern half of Maui.
(SFEC, 8/27/00, p.T8)
c1Mil BC A star in the constellation Scorpius exploded in a super nova and evidence revealed in 1999 that a black hole was formed.
(SFC, 9/9/99, p.A10)
1Mil BC - 2000 BC In the last million or more years several continental glaciations have chilled much of the northern hemisphere and no small portion of the south.
(DD-EVTT, p.281)
950k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
900k BC In 2004 Scientists from the US, Britain and Kenya reported that a skull fragment of a small adult with some characteristics of Homo erectus was about 900,000 years old. It was found in 2003 in Olorgesalie, 100 miles southeast of the capital, Nairobi, Kenya.
(AP, 7/3/04)
900k BC In 2009 scientists reported finding advanced hand axes made about this time in southeastern Spain. Similar Acheulean type limestone tools, flaked on both edges, were at another site nearby dated to 760,000 BC.
(SFC, 9/5/09, p.A1)
890k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
840k BC - 420k BC A large migration of people from Africa to Asia and Europe took place over this period. A 2nd migration period occurred from 150k-80k.
(SFC, 3/7/02, p.A2)
800k BC Ancestors of the Neanderthals and Denisovans left Africa as far back as this time period and replaced or interbred with descendants of Homo erectus.
(SSFC, 9/16/12, p.C11)
800k BC Soleilhac, in the Massif Central of France, is the oldest unquestionable site of hominid occupation in Europe. It offers faunal remains and tools, but no hominid bones.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p.612)
800k BC In 1996 a team of fossil hunters reported 800,000 year-old hominids from the Gran Dolino site in the Atapuerca Mountains in northern Spain. The date was older by 300,000 years than any other human remains in Europe. They called the new species Homo antecessor. Among modern characteristics were a prominent brow line and multiple roots for premolar teeth, characteristics of early hominids.
(PacDis., Spg. 96, p.46)(SFC, 5/30/97, p.A8)
800k BC Some Indonesian and Dutch archeologist have presented evidence that early hominids in Asia made it to the island of Flores in the Javan archipelago.
(PacDis., Spg. 96, p.48)
800k BC The Haleakala shield volcano on Maui, Hawaii, appeared about this time.
(SFEM, 3/16/97, p.28)
800k BC - 450k BC In 2007 researchers dated DNA from Greenland mud under 1.2 miles of ice to about this time. The DNA indicated the presence of pine, yew and alder trees, as well as insects. Due to uncertainties in the dating, scientists could not rule out that the samples dated to the last interglacial, 130,000 to 116,000 years before the present.
(SFC, 7/6/07, p.A14)
780k BC Spanish scientists in 1997 announced a new human species from a 780,000 year old fossil.
(www.anomalous-images.com/news/news049.html)
781k BC Earth's magnetic field underwent a reversal about this time. The periods between polarity changes are called chrons.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field)(SSFC, 5/6/18, p.D12)
c760k BC Mono Lake in California has existed since at least this time.
(PacDis, Summer '97, p.38)
c760k BC The Long Valley Caldera, a 10 by 20 mile crater in central-eastern California, was created by a volcanic eruption in what later became the Bishop area. Mammoth Lakes was later set on the edge of the caldera, 215 miles northeast of LA. In 2003 it was reported that the Long Valley dome had been thrusting upward about an inch a year for the last 8 years.
(SFC,11/15/97, p.A4)(SFC,12/11/97, p.A8)(SFC, 12/20/99, p.A8)(SFC, 12/8/03, p.A4)
760k BC In 2009 scientists reported finding advanced hand axes made about this time in southeastern Spain. Similar Acheulean type limestone tools, flaked on both edges, were at another site nearby dated to 900,000 BC.
(SFC, 9/5/09, p.A1)
c750k BC California's Mono Lake was formed about this time as the Sierra Range lifted and the Great Basin sank.
(SSFC, 9/28/03, p.C12)
740k BC The Red Mountain cinder cone at Flagstaff, Arizona, dated to this time.
(SSFC, 7/23/06, p.G4)
730k BC A meteor crashed in Tasmania making Darwin glass from the friction of hitting.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.466)
730k BC Stegodons, extinct elephant-like animals, lived on the Indonesian island of Flores in association with stone flakes.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.20)
700k BC End of the Early Pleistocene.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)
700k BC A pyroclastic flow (hot gasses, pumice and other dry volcanic materials that roar down a volcano's slopes at one hundred km an hour) in California's Long Valley was so huge that it topped the Sierra Nevada.
(PacDisc. Spring/'96, p.31)
700k BC In 2005 scientists said that 32 black flint artifacts, found in river sediments in Pakefield in eastern England, date back 700,000 years and represent the earliest unequivocal evidence of human presence north of the Alps.
(AP, 12/14/05)
700k BC In 2016 scientists working in Indonesia reported fossil bones of Homo floriensis dating back to about this time. Remains found earlier dated back to 60k-100k years.
(SFC, 6/9/16, p.A9)
700k BC – 130k BC In 2010 experts from Greece and the US found rough axes and other tools, thought to be between 130,000 and 700,000 years, old close to shelters on the south coast of Crete.
(AP, 1/4/11)
670k BC - 400k BC Homo erectus occupied the Longushan cave. The Dragon Bone Hill site is 30 miles southwest of Beijing. The bones were found in the 1920s-1930s and were popularly referred to as Peking Man.
(Arch, 5/04, p.52)
690k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
640k BC Volcanic eruptions in northwest Wyoming, extending to Idaho and Montana, created a caldera some 40 miles long and 30 miles wide. The surface collapsed thousands of feet into a magma pool and marked the area later known as Yellowstone. Continuing eruptions caused climactic changes around the world.
(SFEC, 10/18/98, p.T5)(HC, 10/10/06)
600k BC The EETA 79001 meteorite was blasted from Mars about this time and contained evidence of "microbially produced methane." Its formation was dated to about 175 million years ago.
(SFC, 11/1/96, p.A16)
600k BC A skull of this age from Bodo, Ethiopia, exhibits the largest nasal width of any Homo fossil.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.32)
600k BC Dr. Leakey discovered oldest human skull to date, 600,000 years old, on Jul 17, 1959.
(MC, 7/17/02)
600k BC DNA evidence in 2012 indicated that the polar bears species dated back to about this time.
(Econ, 6/16/12, SR p.9)
600k BC - 500k BC The last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals lived about this time most likely in Africa.
(SFC, 7/11/97, p.A17)
600k BC - 300k BC Excavations begun in 1921 at Zhoukoudian, China, suggested evidence that Peking Man had mastered fire and practiced cannibalism over this period.
(NH, 3/1/04, p.46)
600k BC - 250k BC Homo heidelbergensis. Described in 1996 by Donald Johanson and Blake Edgar in: "From Lucy to Language: The Record of Human Evolution."
(SFC, 12/29/96, BR p.11)
c560k BC Tectonic uplifting caused the California Central Valley inland Corcoran Lake to rise and cut an exit to drain into the Bay Area. This carved Carquinez Strait and plugged the Salinas Valley outlet to Monterey Bay.
(SFC, 12/20/99, p.A8)
560k BC In 2015 French students found a human tooth from about this time in a cave at Tautavel in southwestern France, the oldest human body part ever discovered in the country.
(AP, 7/28/15)
512k BC - 510k BC Anthropologists in 2005 identified fossil chimp teeth and stone tools from this period that indicated humans and chimps inhabited a similar environment in Africa’s Great Rift Valley.
(SFC, 9/1/05, p.A2)
c500k BC The Medicine Lake Volcano created lava tubes that later became known as Lava Beds National Monument in northern California.
(SFC, 5/29/04, p.B4)
500k BC In Boxgrove England, a fossilized rhinoceros shoulder blade with a projectile wound was found recently and dated to this time.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.25)
c500k BC A human jawbone of about this age, homo Heidelbergensis, was found in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1907.
(SFEC, 9/26/99, p.T9)
500kBC Definitive evidence for cooking by Homo erectus dates back to about this time.
(Econ, 3/12/15, p.75)
500k BC - 250k BC Homo sapiens (archaic). Skull of adult male found by Greek villagers at Petralona, Greece in 1960.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 572)
500k BC - 200k BC In Ethiopia a hominid skull from this period was discovered in 2006 at the Gawis river drainage basin in the Afar region.
(Reuters, 3/24/06)
470k-410k In 2014 a UC Berkeley scientist dated Neanderthal bones found in Spain to between 410,000 and 470,000 years of age. Excavations had begun in 1984 in a cave in Spain’s Atapuerco mountains at a site called Sima de los Huesos (the Pit of the Bones).
(SFC, 6/20/14, p.D1)(www.atapuerca.org/huesosin.htm)
450k BC Scientists in 2017 reported that a giant waterfall tens of kilometers wide broke down a ridge which connected modern-day England to mainland Europe about this time, unleashing a mega-flood that gouged out the Channel and created the island of Britain.
(AFP, 4/4/17)
450k BC - 180k BC In 2007 scientists using sonar reported that at least 2 massive floods during this period cut Britain off from the European continent. Evidence of humans living in Britain began to show up only from about 60,000 BC.
(SFC, 7/19/07, p.A7)
c435k BC A major eruption by Mount Lassen in California left sediment called the Rockland Ash that could later be seen in the sea cliffs of Fort Funston on the SF coast.
(SFC, 12/20/99, p.A8)
c430k BC A prolonged warm period that lasted 28,000 years reached its peak about this time.
(SFC, 6/10/04, A15)
420k BC - 290k BC The youngest Homo erectus (from China) date in this period.
(NH, 4/97, p.70)
400k BC Activity at Mount Tehama volcano, Part of the Lassen volcanic center in the Sacramento Valley of California, declined about this time. Volcanic ash from its eruptions could later be seen in a band of white material on the cliff of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach at Fort Funston.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tehama)(SSFC, 6/21/15, p.A2)
400k BC In 2010 a Tel Aviv University team excavating a cave in central Israel said teeth found in the cave are about 400,000 years old and resemble those of other remains of modern man, known scientifically as Homo sapiens, found in Israel. The earliest Homo sapiens remains found until now are half as old. The prehistoric Qesem cave was discovered in 2000, and excavations began in 2004.
(AP, 12/28/10)
400k BC Irish Elk (Megaloceros giganteus) lived in temperate climates throughout Europe and western Asia from about this time to a last record in Ireland at 10,600 years ago.
(NH, 8/96, p.17)
400k BC Human and wolf bones have been found in the same place from about this time.
(SFC, 6/13/97, p.A10)
400k BC In 1998 researchers at Duke Univ., studying hypoglossal canals in fossil skulls, suggested that Neanderthals could well have developed speech at this time. The research was disputed in 1999.
(SFC, 2/16/99, p.A2)
400k BC Researchers in 2000 found evidence from a homo erectus skull, Sm 3, of this period that individuals communicated with each other.
(SFC, 11/14/00, p.A9)
400k BC Scientists in 2013 reported mitochondrial DNA results from a Human thighbone found in Spain estimated to be 400,000 years old. The DNA showed a closer relation to Denisovans who lived in Siberia than to Neanderthals.
(SFC, 12/5/13, p.A9)
400k BC - 380k BC Researchers in Germany in 1997 unearthed wooden spears made of spruce of this age from an ancient lakeshore hunting ground. The spears were found in a coal mine in Shöningen, near Hanover.
(SFC, 2/27/97, p.A6)(AM, May/Jun 97 p.25)
400k BC - 300k BC Articulate speech becomes possible according to Dr. Laitman, anatomist at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. His studies show that the degree to which the base of the skull is flexed, or bent, is indicative of whether the larynx can move up or down. Early Homo skulls are only slightly flexed at the base, so that full command of articulate speech was a later development.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 600)
400k BC - 48k BC A human group, later called the Denisovans, lived in Asia during this period. They then interbred with humans expanding from Africa along the coast of South Asia. In 2010 fossil evidence from a Siberian cave in 2008 revealed that their DNA was related to the DNA of people from New Guinea, which contained 4.8% Denisovan DNA. 3-5% of the DNA from native people of Papua New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines and other nearby islands came from Denisovans, who left Africa as far back as 800,000 BC. In 2014 scientists reported that a genetic between extinct Denisovans and some modern-day Tibetans and Sherpas.
(SFC, 12/23/10, p.A4)(SSFC, 9/16/12, p.C11)(SFC, 7/3/14, p.D1)
385k BC - 172k BC In 2018 it was reported that stone tools, found in India, were fashioned during this period by Neanderthals, Homo sapiens or an evolutionary cousin.
(SFC, 2/1/18, p.A4)
380k BC The skull of an archaic member of the genus Homo was later found in Zambia. It exhibited a hypoglossal canal similar to modern humans, which indicated at least the potential for speech.
(SFC, 4/28/98, p.A5)
370k BC - 260k BC The site of Diring Yuriakh in central Siberia has stone flakes and simple tools known as unifacial choppers that date by thermoluminescence to this period.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.21)
c350k BC Humans left tracks in the volcanic ash of the Roccamonfina volcano in Italy.
(SFC, 3/13/03, p.2)
300k BC Erectus seems to give way to his successor, Homo sapiens.
(NG, Nov. 1985, K.F. Weaver, p.600)
300k BC Scientists in 2017 reported that five individuals from a site called Jebel Irhoud in Morocco looked like modern humans and dated to about this time. This made them the oldest Homo sapiens found to date. Up to now the earliest Homo sapiens fossils found in Ethiopia dated back 195,000 years.
(SFC, 6/8/17, p.A14)(Econ 6/10/17, p.77)
300k BC - 250k BC In 1981 Russian Archeologist Yuri Mochanov of the Yakutish Academy of Sciences announced the discovery of human habitation in northern Siberia that dated back to at least 30,000 years. More precise techniques later measured the stone artifacts at the site to 250k-300k BC.
(SFC, 2/28/97, p.A15)
300k BC - 200k BC Swanscombe skull. Fragments of sapiens skull representing Britain's oldest known human remains.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 612)
300k BC - 200k BC In the Sierra de Atapuerca fossil remains of 32 people from this time were found at Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones) in northern Spain. They represented an early stage in the development of Neanderthals. Grooves were observed in the roots immediately under the crowns of rear teeth, probably from the use of toothpicks.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.31)
300k BC - 30kBC The Neanderthal man of the type first found in 1856 lived over this period. Dental evidence in 2004 indicated that they reached adulthood by about age 15.
(SFC, 7/11/97, p.A17)(WSJ, 4/29/04, p.A1)
300k BC - 12k During the periodic ice ages the Loess Hills formed along the eastern side of the Missouri River when westerly winds blew the silty sediments of the melted glaciers along the low walls of the river valley.
(NH, 11/96, p.76)
c299k BC In 1921 the Broken Hill skull, also called the Kabwe skull in recognition of a nearby town, was discovered by a Swiss miner working in the Broken Hill lead and zinc mine in Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia). In 2020 sophisticated dating methods determined the skull to be about 299,000 years old, plus or minus 25,000 years. Scientists initially assigned the skull to a species they called Homo rhodesiensis. Most scientists in 2020 assign it to the species Homo heidelbergensis, which inhabited parts of Africa and Europe starting about 600,000 years ago.
(AP, 4/1/20)
c280k BC A mastodon tooth and camel jaw of about this time were found in 1997 in tunnels under Los Angeles in 1997.
(SFC, 2/12/97, p.A11)
c250k BC About this time the human brain size stopped its slow trend toward enlargement. It may correspond with the human attainment of the rudiments of language.
(NH, 9/97, p.6)
c250k BC The ice dome at Summit, the center of the Greenland ice cap, was about this age at its bedrock.
(SFC, 10/9/97, p.C18)
c250k BC In Siberia stone tools along a river near Irkutsk were dated by radioisotope to about this time.
(SFC, 2/17/98, p.A2)
240kBC-9kBC This is called the Rancholabrean age and is named after the La Brea tar pits near Los Angeles.
(SFC, 8/3/13, p.C3)
250k BC - 100k BC The period of the Lower Paleolithic.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)
233k BC An eruption spewed volcanic fallout over a wide swathe of Ethiopia about this time. In 2022 it was reported that Homo sapiens fossils found in Ethiopia in 1967 are older than previously believed. Researchers said they used the geochemical fingerprints of a thick layer of ash found above the sediments containing the fossils to ascertain that it resulted from an eruption that spewed volcanic fallout over a wide swathe of Ethiopia about this time. The new findings conform with the most recent scientific models of human evolution placing the emergence of Homo sapiens sometime between 350,000 to 200,000 years ago.
(Reuters, 1/12/22)
c200k BC In 1911 a broken wooden spear shaped earlier than this age was found at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, UK.
(SFC, 6/28/97, p.E3)
200k BC A recent theory suggests that we're all descended from one African "Eve" who lived some 200,000 years ago. The theory is based on DNA studies from the placentas of 147 women of different racial backgrounds.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.434,460)
200k BC Within the past 200,000 years our own species, Homo sapiens, dispersed out of Africa.
(PacDis., Spg. 96, p.46)
200k BC It is speculated that the Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens split from a common ancestor about this time. DNA research in 2008 indicated that shortly after this time Homo Sapiens split into 2 groups. Most people in 2008 represented one group, while the bushmen of southern Africa represented the other.
(SFC, 10/1/96, p.A2)(Econ, 4/26/08, p.101)
200k BC About this time a major earthquake in Hawaii caused a large tsunami that crossed the Pacific in 4 hours and up the shoreline of Japan for 300 yards.
(SFC, 2/17/97, p.A4)
200k BC Human speech began no earlier than about this time.
(SFC, 1/10/00, p.A6)
200k BC In 2010 Israeli archeologists found shards of flint found scattered around a fire pit in a cave near Tel Aviv dating to this time. They said the shards might be the world's oldest known disposable knives.
(AP, 8/30/10)
200k BC - 30k BC The Neanderthals lived in Europe and southwest Asia. In 1996 it was discovered that skulls of Neanderthals showed oblong, vertical swellings in the bone along the sides of the nasal hole. Researchers also claimed that their noses were unusually large.
(WH, 1994, p.21)(SFC, 10/1/96, p.A2)
195k BC Human fossils found in Ethiopia in 1967 were dated in 2005 to be about 195k years old.
(SFC, 2/17/05, p.A6)
186k BC Human footprints that dated back to this time were discovered along Langebaan Lagoon some 60 miles north of Cape Town, South Africa, in Sep, 1995. The 117,000 year-old prints were cut out and moved to the South African Museum in 1998.
(SFC, 8/15/97, p.A1,17)(SFC, 2/27/98, p.D3)(SFC, 6/24/98, p.A12)
186k BC An ice age began about this time.
(SFC, 8/15/97, p.A17)
180k BC On Malta the Ghar Dalam cave near the harbor of Marsaxlokk revealed bones dating to about this time of an extinct pygmy hippo and elephant.
(AM, Jul/Aug '97 p.42)
176.5k BC In France Neanderthals created two stone rings in a cave in Bruniquel. The oval structures, measuring 172 and 25 square feet, and were discovered in 1990 and dated to about this time in 2016.
(SFC, 5/26/16, p.A4)
c170k BC In 2000 the Mitochondrial Eve, the single female ancestor of all humans, was dated to this time.
(NH, 3/1/04, p.32)
170k BC A supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud occurred and was not detected until its light reached earth in 1987CE. It was a catastrophic implosion of matter in less than a second to a dense object about 15 miles across, a neutron star.
(NG, 5/88, p.629,635)
165k BC In 2009 scientific analysis of stone age tools from South Africa suggested that humans about this time began using fire to make it easier to flake stone tools and to make them sharper. The process was believed to have become widespread by about 70000BC.
(SFC, 8/26/09, p.A3)
164k BC In 2007 scientists reported that shellfish evidence from the a cave at Pinnacle Point near Mossel Bay, South Africa, indicated human habitation at this time and that red ochre at the site indicated a cognitive world enriched by symbols.
(SFC, 10/18/07, p.A8)
160k BC Scientists in 2019 reported that a fossilized chunk of jawbone found by a monk in a Chinese cave nearly 40 years earlier has been revealed as coming from the Denisovans, a mysterious relative of the Neanderthals. The right half of a jawbone with teeth is at least 160,000 years old.
(AP, 5/2/19)
160k BC An ice-core drilled by Russian scientists at Vostok Station in East Antarctica was analyzed by a group of scientists in Grenoble, Switzerland and is bound to go back to an ice-age of this period.
(NOHY, Weiner, 3/90, p.67)(See Nature 329, 10/87)
160k BC - 154k BC Fossils of human skulls, found in 1997 near Herto, Ethiopia, were dated in 2003 to this period. Tim D. White and colleagues made the find.
(SFC, 6/12/03, p.A10)
150k BC The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, Ca., are no older than 150k years.
(SFC, 4/8/05, p.A17)
c150k BC In 1980 evidence of Aboriginal habitation in Australia were discovered in charcoal remains deep in the bed of the Great Barrier Reef and dated to this time.
(SFEC, 2/28/99, p.T4)
c150k BC Humans moved out beyond Africa about this time.
(WSJ, 7/13/01, p.W16)
150k BC - 80k BC A large migration of people from Africa to Asia and Europe took place over this period. An earlier migration period occurred from 840k-420k.
(SFC, 3/7/02, p.A2)
140k BC -120k BC In 2021 scientists reported that bones found in an Israeli quarry are from a branch of the human evolutionary tree and are 120,000 to 140,000 years old. The fragments of a skull, lower jaw bone and tooth were uncovered in Nesher Ramla in 2010. Researchers determined that the fossils likely came from a hominin group closely related to Neanderthals and sharing many of their features, such as the shape of the lower jaw.
(AP, 6/24/21)
140k BC - 70k BC DNA evidence indicated that a hunter-gatherer group diverged from an original common ancestor in Africa about this time and migration out of Africa followed.
(SFC, 6/9/03, p.A4)
135kBC DNA evidence in 1997 indicated that the modern dog has been around since about this time.
(SFC, 6/13/97, p.A10)(MT, Fall 02, p.14)
135k BC - 90k BC Severe droughts impacted Eastern Africa over this period.
(WSJ, 4/25/08, p.A2)
130.7k BC Researchers in 2017 said humanlike behavior dating to about this time was shown in the smashed bones of elephant-like mastodon unearthed by during a routine dig in the winter of 1992-93 during a freeway expansion project in San Diego, Ca. Researchers speculated that the bone smashers could have been Neanderthals, Denisovans or Homo erectus.
(SFC, 4/27/17, p.A7)(Econ, 4/29/17, p.64)
130k BC The "first true Homo sapiens" about this time were from Ethiopia and described in 1996 by Donald Johanson and Blake Edgar in: "From Lucy to Language: The Record of Human Evolution" (1996).
(SFC, 12/29/96, BR p.11)
130k BC The lineage that includes the domestic cat and its wild relatives originated about this time. Genetic analysis in 2007 suggested that the transformation of a vicious predator into a docile tabby took place about 10,000 years ago.
(www.livescience.com/animals/070628_cat_family.html)
130k BC - 30k BC The Middle Stone Age.
(SFC, 4/28/95, p.A-1)
126k BC-11.7k BC The Late Pleistocene is a geochronological age of the Pleistocene Epoch and is associated with Upper Pleistocene or Tarantian stage Pleistocence series rocks. The beginning of the stage is defined by the base of the Eemian interglacial phase before the final glacial episode of the Pleistocene 126,000 ~+mn~ 5,000 years ago. The end of the age is defined as 11,700 years BC. The age represents the end of the Pleistocene epoch and is followed by the Holocene epoch.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene)
125k BC Neandertal Homo sapiens indicates that brain size and organization were basically modern. The Neanderthals were the first people known to bury their dead. The Neanderthals spread all across Europe, the Middle East, and western and central Asia.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 612, 614, 616)
125k BC Scientists in 2000 identified human stone tools of this time from a fossil reef along the Red Sea coast of Eritrea. They identified the area as the "world's first oyster bar."
(SFC, 5/5/00, p.A2)
125k BC A long period of global warming began that lasted to about 11.5k BC. Polar meltwater raised the sea level by 4-6 meters.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ice_Age_Temperature.png)(Econ, 6/16/12, SR p.7)
125k-80k The Daly City Dunes on the western end of San Bruno Mountain formed during this period, when the North Peninsula of the San Francisco Bay Area was an island and water lapped at the base of the mountain.
(www.mountainwatch.org/kens-words/2012/1/19/save-the-daly-city-dunes.html)
120k BC End of the Middle Pleistocene. Middle Pleistocene began 700,000 years ago.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)
120k BC A Chinese fossil skullcap, named Maba, is stored in Beijing at the Inst. of Vertebrate Paleontology.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.464)
120k BC In 2014 a bulldozer enlarging a reservoir near Snowmass, Colorado, uncovered a trove of fossil bones dating to about this time.
(SFC, 11/27/14, p.A6)
120k BC The Earth’s ice age that began around 186,000BC receded about this time.
(SFC, 8/15/97, p.A17)
120k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
120k BC - 80k BC Oct 14, Researchers in 2015 reported that 47 fossilized human teeth found in China’s Hunan province dated back to this period. Earlier fossils from southern Asia were only about 45,000 years old.
(SFC, 10/15/15, p.A5)
120k BC - 80k BC Bone fragments from this period of Neanderthals from the Moula-Guercy cave site in France were reported in 1999 to show evidence of cannibalism.
(SFC, 10/1/99, p.A3)
120k BC - 60k BC The Klasies River Mouth fossils, found in caves in a bluff overlooking the Indian Ocean on the southern tip of (Africa) the continent. Although fragmented, the fossils indicated early modern man.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 460)
120k BC - 10k BC In Thailand the site at Chiang Saen indicates long term occupation that dates back to the late Pleistocene.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.G)
118k BC In 2021 Scientists said artifacts unearthed in a cave in Morocco dating back as far as 120,000 years ago indicate that humans were making specialized bone tools, skinning animals and then using tools to process these skins for fur and leather.
(Reuters, 9/16/21)
114k BC Controversial data from the Jinmium rock-shelter in northern Australia suggests humans may have reached the continent at this time.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.21)
110k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
110k BC A Homo sapiens skull of this time was later found near the Kebara site in Israel. It had a hypoglossal canal the size of modern humans, which was thought to be indicative of speech.
(SFC, 4/28/98, p.A5)
100k BC The last high stand of the sea at the middle coast of California was about this time. (GH-CEH, p.20)
100k BC In 2008 DNA evidence indicated that much of the human population had descended from a small band of migrants that left Africa for the Middle East about this time.
(SFC, 2/22/08, p.A4)
100k BC Neanderthal man began to bury his dead.
(NG, Nov. 1985, R. Leakey & A. Walker, p.629)
100k BC Spear-like tools are found in eastern Zaire near Lake Rutanzige. Three sites along the Semlike River in the Katanda region of Africa's Great Rift Valley show tools made from the rib bones of large mammals. The tools have rows of barbs cut along one edge of the bone. New testing techniques for age determination were used; i.e. thermoluminescence, electron spin resonance, and uranium series dating. The three ranges were: 180,000BC-75,000; 160,000BC-89,000; and 173,000BC-139,000. [see 88k]
(SFC, 4/28/95, p.A-1)
100k BC Small stone tools found in Gaojia near Fengdu on the banks of the Yangtze indicate a tool workshop. More than a 1,000 tools have been found and were probably used to collect roots.
(NH, 7/96, p.32)
c100k BC In 1943 construction workers in Millbrae, Ca., uncovered elephant bones that dated to about this time.
(Ind, 9/21/02, 5A)
100k BC About this time another major earthquake in Hawaii caused a large tsunami that crossed the Pacific in 4 hours and up the shoreline of Japan for 300 yards. [see 200,000BC]
(SFC, 2/17/97, p.A4)
100k BC The Caribbean rodent Amblyrhiza, a 300-pound rat, died out about this time.
(NH, 4/97, p.84)
100,000 In 2008 scientists unearthed human-made paint “toolkits" from the Blombos Cave in South Africa dating to about this time.
(SFC, 10/14/11, p.A5)
100k BC Hunters stalked giant camels in the Syrian desert about this time. Bones of the “Syrian Camel," as tall as some modern-day elephants, were discovered 150 miles north of Damascus in 2005.
(AP, 10/11/06)
100k BC - 80k BC In 2007 a human skull from this time, consisting of 16 pieces, was dug up after two years of excavation at a site in Xuchang in China’s Henan province.
(AFP, 1/23/08)
100k BC - 80k BC In 2010 Polish scientists announced the discovery of 3 Neanderthal teeth, dating back to about this time, in the Stajnia Cave, north of the Carpathian Mountains.
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100201/ap_on_re_eu/eu_poland_neanderthal_teeth)
100k BC - 50k BC The 200-pound Genyornis newtoni, an ostrich-like bird, and the 25-foot Megalonia lizard were among the megafauna that flourished in Australia during this period.
(SFC, 1/8/99, p.A2)
100k BC - 35k BC This is the approximate Mousterian cultural period.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)
100k BC - 35k BC This is the Middle Paleolithic.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)
95k BC In 2003 a 3-foot-tall adult female skeleton was found in a cave believed to be 18,000 years old on the equatorial island of Flores, located east of Java and northwest of Australia. Scientists named the extinct species Homo floresiensis. Scientists in 2005 said the group emerged some 95,000 years earlier and went extinct about 12,000 years ago.
(AP, 10/27/04)(SFC, 10/28/04, p.A1)(SFC, 3/4/05, p.A2)
90k BC An Israeli-French team working in Israel use the technique of thermoluminescence to show early modern humans from Qafzeh cave. A Neandertal from Kebara cave showed an age of 60,000 years. The study was meant to find out the relationship between the two groups.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 460)
90k BC Humans migrated into the Levant if not Europe proper by this time.
(NH, 7/96, p.72)
90k BC Potassium-argon dating and thermoluminescence can be used to date pieces of pottery back to about this time.
(SFEC, 12/15/96, BR p.7)
88k BC The Katanda site in Zaire (Congo) was dated to this time. Evidence in the 1990s showed bone points showed barbs on 3 edges and rings carved in the base to tie them to shafts.
(SFC, 1/11/02, p.A2)
80k BC In 1983 an international expedition of American, Polish and Egyptian anthropologists in the Aswan region unexpectedly came upon the skeleton of a prehistoric man thought to be about 80,000 years old, the oldest human skeleton ever found in Egypt. Early modern humans were present in the Levant between 130,000-80,000 BP.
(http://tinyurl.com/2l2rmz)(www.athenapub.com/8shea1.htm)
80k BC - 70k BC The human population declined suddenly according to evidence from the mutation rate of mitochondria evaluated in 2000. The survivors provided the gene pool for all humans thereafter.
(DC, 7/1/00)
77k BC In 2011 scientists in South Africa said layers of cave floor at a natural rock shelter called Sibudu dated to this time with evidence of plant-based bedding used by humans.
(Econ, 12/10/11, p.90)
75k BC In 2002 evidence from the Blombos Cave in South Africa indicated possible symbolic thinking. Sophisticated tools of stone and carve bone had etchings that indicated complex behavior. Evidence of ornamental bead-making was reported in 2004.
(SFC, 1/11/02, p.A2)(SFC, 4/16/04, p.A2)
75k BC Human head lice and body lice diverged about this time, which means that human clothing began about this time.
(Econ, 12/24/05, Survey p.7)
74k BC The major Toba volcanic eruption occurred in Sumatra about this time. It was later believed that this eruption caused a major temperature drop and reduction in the human population. An ice age soon followed. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA seemed to corroborate a significant reduction in human population around this time.
(DC, 9/2/02)(Econ, 12/24/05, Survey p.9)
70k BC Two Neanderthal skulls from France of this time were later found. They had a hypoglossal canal the size of modern humans, which was thought to be indicative of speech.
(SFC, 4/28/98, p.A5)
70k BC Genetic studies in 2008 estimated that the human population at this time may have shrunk to as low as 2000 in Eastern Africa due to a long period of severe droughts there.
(WSJ, 4/25/08, p.A2)
70k BC A handful of Africans left the continent of their birth about this time.
(Econ, 4/29/17, p.64)
69k BC Scientists reported in 2012 that shard evidence known as microliths from South Africa indicated that people from this time were capable of making arrow heads by heating a suitable lump of rock in a fire and then bashing it to flake pieces from the surface.
(Econ, 11/10/12, p.84)
66k BC Scientists in 2010 said Mammoth Mountain in the central California Sierras was formed about this time as a result of volcanic eruptions that took place over less than 2,000 years.
(SFC, 3/8/10, p.C1)
c65k BC Geneticists in 2005 used DNA evidence to conclude that human emigration from Africa took place about this time from the southern end of the Red Sea and then pushing along the coast of India and Southeast Asia. The Orang Asli people of Malaysia likely descended from this 1st migration.
(SFC, 5/13/05, p.A7)(Econ, 12/24/05, Survey p.5)
65k BC In 2007 a metatarsal from the Callao Man was discovered in the Philippines and dated in 2010 by uranium-series dating to about this time.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabon_Man)
65k BC In 2021 it was reported that red ochre pigment discovered on stalagmites in the Caves of Ardales, near Malaga in southern Spain, were created by Neanderthals about this time, making them possibly the first artists on earth.
(Reuters, 8/8/21)
60k BC A Neandertal from Kebara cave (Israel) showed an age of 60,000 years. An Israeli-French team working in Israel use the technique of thermoluminescence to study the relationship between early humans and Neanderthals.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 460)
60k BC At Shanidar, a large cave in the Zagros mountains of northeastern Iraq soil samples from a grave of a [Neanderthal] man of this time indicated pollen grains from 8 different types of flowers. [2nd ref dated at c.10,000BC]
(WH, 1994, p.21)(SFEM, 6/7/98, p.52)
60k BC - 10k BC The Acheulian Age or early Stone Age culture lasted over this period.
(Enc. of Africa, 1976, p.165)
57k BC Scientists in 2000 estimated that a Y-chromosome African male, nicknamed Adam, dated to about this time. Genetic analysis traced all modern human males back to this ancestor.
(NH, 3/1/04, p.34)(NG, 8/04, p.42)
53k BC In 2008 a human cranium dating to about this time was found in the Manot Cave in Israel. Anthropologists later said the cranium was a missing connection between African and European populations.
(SFC, 1/29/15, p.A7)
53k BC - 50k BC During this period the first humans migrated to Australia from the islands of Indonesia. It is believed that they came in bamboo rafts from Indonesia and also from southern China.
(SFC, 1/8/99, p.A2)(NG, Oct. 1988, p.467)
53k BC - 45k BC Australia's early human population wiped out the continent's megafauna over this period.
(SFC, 6/8/01, p.A8)
53k BC - 27k BC Prehuman fossils from a site on the Solo River near the Javanese town of Ngandong were dated in 1996 to this period, and identified as belonging to the species of Homo erectus. Brain size was equivalent to modern humans.
(SFC, 12/13/96, p.A4)(NH, 4/97, p.70)(NH, 9/97, p.6)
52k BC Scientists in 2022 reported that modern humans lived about this time at the Mandrin Grotto in southern France.
(https://tinyurl.com/2p847cby)(AP, 2/9/22)
51k BC The fossil of a Diprotodon, a giant marsupial from this time, was excavated in 2001 from Cox's Creek in New South Wales.
(SFC, 6/8/01, p.A8)
51k BC - 44k BC Scientists in 2022 reported that an asteroid struck a mountain ridge during this period in China's Heilongjiang Province leaving a crater about 1.85 km wide. It was named Yilan, after a nearby city.
(https://tinyurl.com/2p8jjn9c)
50k BC Homo sapiens sapiens, man the doubly wise, appeared about this time. In 2000 DNA evidence indicated that modern man evolved out of Africa as recently as this time.
(NOHY, Weiner, 3/90, p.5)(SFC, 12/7/00, p.A3)
50k BC Research on hair DNA in 2011 indicated that the first humans arrived in Australia about this time.
(SFC, 9/23/11, p.A10)
50k BC In 2017 scientists in Mexico discovered microbial life trapped in crystals in caves in Naica that dated to about this time.
(SSFC, 2/19/17, p.A2)
50k BC The stone age culture of Papua New Guinea goes back this time.
(SFC, 5/29/96, p.A8)
50k BC Arizona’s Barringer Crater was created about this time by a meteor. Named after mining engineer Daniel Barringer, it measures 3/4 of a mile wide and 640 feet deep and is suspected to have resulted from a meteor of about 100 feet in diameter. An iron meteor 100 feet in diameter and weighing about 60,000 tons crashed into the desert at about 45,000 miles per hour near Winslow, Az. A crater 4,000 feet wide and 570 feet deep was created. 85% of it melted and the rest broke into bits called Canyon Diablo meteorites.
(SFC, 7/2/99, p.A7)(www.barringercrater.com/science/)
50k BC - 40k BC Homo sapiens (Neandertal). Skull of adult male found by D. Peyrony and L. Capitan at La Ferrassie, France in 1909. Neandertal is the German site of discovery in 1856.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 573)
50k BC - 40k BC A Homo neanderthalensis skull was found at the Amud cave in Israel in 1961.
(NH, 4/97, p.22)
50k BC-20k BC Archaeologists have identified evidence of stone age technology in Aq Kupruk, and Hazar Sum. Plant remains at the foothill of the Hindu Kush mountains indicate, that North Afghanistan was one of the earliest places to domestic plants and animals.
(https://www.afghan-web.com/history/chronology/)rasi
50k BC-20k BC Researches in 2012 reported that DNA evidence has indicated the presence of foreign DNA indicating interbreeding during this period between humans and an unknown sister species called “a Neanderthal sibling species in Africa." Humans apparently shared the planet with this cousin species for over150,000 years.
(SFC, 7/27/12, p.A12)
48k BC In 2004 archeologists claimed to have found evidence of human habitation at a site along the Savannah River in Allendale County, SC.
(SFC, 11/18/04, p.A7)
c48k BC An iron meteor 100 feet in diameter and weighing about 60,000 tons crashed into the desert at about 45,000 miles per hour near Winslow, Az. near the current Lowell Observatory. Meteor Crater measured 4,000 feet wide and 570 feet deep. 85% of it melted and the rest broke into bits called Canyon Diablo meteorites. This was the first crater to be identified as being caused by a meteor.
(SFC, 7/2/99, p.A7)
c48k BC Charcoal from camp fires in the Pedra Faruda site of Piaui state, Brazil, were carbon dated in 1987 to this time.
(SFEC, 2/20/00, p.A18)
48k BC - 44k BC In Australia about 85% of the land-dwelling megafauna weighing over 100 pounds went extinct about this time. It was later suspected that systematic burning of the forests by humans contributed to the extinction. Some 55 species died off including the 230-pound flightless "thunder bird" called Genyornis.
(SFC, 1/8/99, p.A2)(SFC, 6/8/01, p.A8)
48k BC - 30k BC In 2010 scientists reported that genetic material, pulled from a pinky finger bone found in a Siberian cave dating to this period, showed a new and unknown type of pre-human living about this time alongside modern humans and Neanderthals.
(Reuters, 3/24/10)(SFC, 3/25/10, p.A4)(Econ, 3/27/10, p.87)
48k BC -18k BC In 2011 the journal Current Biology reported that all polar bears today have descended from one female brown bear in Ireland between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago.
(SFC, 7/8/11, p.A6)
45k BC The extinction of most of Australia’s large animals occurred about this time, shortly after the arrival of humans.
(SFC, 7/8/05, p.A2)
45k BC - 42k BC Archeologists in 2007 reported on human teeth, tools, beads, carved ivory and other artifacts dug up at the Kostenki archeological site on the Don River in Russia, about 250 miles south of Moscow. They dated these artifacts to 45,000 to 42,000 years ago, an age similar to other items found in Western Europe.
(Reuters, 1/11/07)
43k BC In 2016 Russian scientists reported that mammoth bones from about this time, found near the Kara Sea in Siberia, indicated that they were hunted by humans.
(SFC, 1/15/16, p.A6)
43k BC A flute-like instrument made of bear bone was found by archeologist Janez Dirjec at the Divje Babe site in the valley of the Idrijca River in Slovenia. It was believed to be about 45,000 years old.
(SFC, 10/31/96, p.A12)
c43k BC About this time some 7 women led to the descendants of the population of modern Europe. In 2001 geneticist Bryan Sykes authored "The Seven Daughters of Eve."
(WSJ, 7/13/01, p.W16)
43k BC Scientists in 2008 reported that one of two genetically distinct mammoth groups went extinct about this time.
(www.science.psu.edu/alert/Schuster6-2008.htm)
43k BC-41k BC Home sapiens populations were living in Italy by this time.
(SFC, 6/15/12, p.A11)
42k BC Poison-tipped arrows and ostrich egg beads were made by hunter-gatherers in South Africa. In 2012 the artifacts were said to be characteristic of the San hunter-gatherers.
(SFC, 7/31/12, p.A2)
42.2k BC-39.5k BC Home sapiens populations were living in England by this time.
(SFC, 6/15/12, p.A11)
41k BC Scholars surmised that diggers in Africa's Swaziland began to seek iron about this time.
(SFEC, 5/11/97, Z1 p.7)
41k BC In 2006 archeologists reported evidence of cannibalism about this time from Neanderthal bones at the El Sidron cave in the Asturias region of Spain.
(SFC, 12/11/06, p.A1)
41k BC A land bridge between Australia and Tasmania formed about this time allowing people to cross into Tasmania. Two thousand years later the megafauna of Tasmania were gone.
(Econ, 9/14/13, SR p.5)
41k BC The skull of a giant kangaroo dating to this time was found in a cave in the thick rainforest of the rugged northwest of Tasmania in 2000. Scientists used the skull to argue that that man likely hunted to death the giant kangaroo and other very large animals on the southern island of Tasmania.
(AP, 8/12/08)
40.7k BC In 1992 rock engravings in South Australia are carbon dated at 42,700 years.
(SF E&C, 1/15/1995, T-4)
40k BC This date approximately marks the Aurignacian cultural period represented by characteristic stone and bone tool kits.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)(AM, 7/00, p.30)
40k BC The oldest Asian Homo sapiens are about this age.
(NH, 4/97, p.70)
40k BC Home sapiens in Germany were making flutes about this time.
(SFC, 6/15/12, p.A11)
40k BC The earliest evidence for personal ornaments appeared in anatomically modern humans about this time.
(AM, 7/00, p.30)
40k BC The bones of a Neanderthal baby from this time were found in southwestern France in 1914. The "Le Moustier 2" bones were put away and re-discovered in 1996.
(SFC, 9/5/02, p.A16)
40k BC In later Washington state Mount St. Helens was born and intermittent eruptions continued to about 500BC.
(SFEC, 8/16/98, p.A15)
c40k BC Volcanic activity began forming the craters and mountains around Mono Lake, Ca.
(PacDis, Summer '97, p.2)
40k BC - 20k BC DNA evidence indicated that 4 distinct population lineages entered the New World across the Bering Sea during this period.
(SFC, 2/17/98, p.A2)
40k BC - 12k BC A great river of ice formed in Oregon’s Wallowa Valley. The moraines around Wallowa Lake remained after the glacier melted.
(SSFC, 7/9/06, p.G4)
40k BC - 2000 Sea level seems to have dropped at least four times in this period.
(DD-EVTT, p.300)
39k BC In 2005 scientists suggested that a supernova took place about this time at a distance of 250 light years from Earth. A shock wave of iron rich grains hit Earth 7,000 years later. Slower debris accumulated into comet-like objects. They suggested that one may have hit North America about 11,000BC and caused the extinction of mammoths.
(SFC, 9/24/05, p.B2)
38.8k BC Wall decorations in the El Castillo cave in northwestern Spain dated to at least this time.
(SFC, 6/15/12, p.A11)
38k BC Stone-age humans came to Europe, probably from central Asia and the Middle East, in 2 waves of migration that began about this time. DNA evidence from Y-chromosomes in 2000 CE suggested that 4 of 5 European men shared a common ancestor from this 1st wave.
(SFC, 11/10/00, p.A7)
38k BC The oldest fossils found at the La Brea tar pits in southern California dated back to about this time. In 1913 mass excavations began there.
(Econ, 11/9/13, p.85)
38k BC A 30 cm. high figure with human legs, an arm and the head of a lion was carved about this time in southwestern Germany. Its fragments were discovered in 1939 and pieced together over the next three decades.
(Econ, 2/2/13, p.71)
c38k BC In 2003 British scientists found 40,000-year-old human footprints in central Mexico, shattering theories that mankind arrived in the Americas tens of thousands of years later from Asia. The footprints were found in an abandoned quarry close to the Cerro Toluquilla volcano and were subsequently studied and dated by a multinational team of scientists.
(AFP, 7/5/05)
38k BC The carbon dating process can be used to date specimens that were alive as long as 40,000 years ago.
(SFEC, 12/15/96, BR p.7)
c38k BC Volcanic activity on Kauai, Ha., ended about this time.
(SFEC, 8/29/99, p.T6)
38k BC One group of wooly mammoths died off in North America about this time for unknown reasons. The demise of a 2nd group took place about 10,900BC.
(SFC, 6/14/07, p.A22)
38k BC - 1996 Scientists in Australia said that they found a shrub in Tasmania that began growing 40,000 years ago. Dubbed "King's Holly," the plant clones itself and now covers 2 secluded river gullies in the remote southwest.
(SFC, 10/26/96, p.A17)
36k BC A woolly mammoth died on the Texas Gulf Coast. It was unearthed in 2004 and tentatively dated to this time.
(AP, 1/13/04)
36k BC - 34k BC In 2002 the jawbone of a cave-man living in what is now Romania was found in Pestera cu Oase. It was reported as the oldest fossil from an early modern human to be found in Europe and was carbon-dated to this time.
(AP, 9/22/03)
35k BC Human kind does not seem to have been addicted to war throughout its history on earth. Paleontologists believe that before about 35,000BC men many have dealt with one another the way higher apes do today. There is conflict among the higher apes, but no warfare.
(V.D.-H.K.p.408)
35k BC This date approximately marks the Neandertal Chatelperronian cultural period with characteristics copied from Aurignacian neighbors.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)(AM, 7/00, p.30)
35k BC In 2008 archeologists unearthed tools dating back at least 35,000 years in a rock shelter in Australia's remote northwest, making it one of the oldest archaeological finds in that part of the country.
(AP, 4/7/08)
35k BC A piece of a stone axe dating to this time was discovered in 2010 on sacred Aboriginal land in Australia, the oldest object of its type ever found. Archeologists said the discovery is evidence that Aboriginal Jawoyn people from Arnhem Land could have been the first to grind axes to sharpen their edges.
(AP, 11/5/10)
35k BC In Australia the Budj Bim volcano erupted about this time. Three overlapping volcanic craters formed Lake Surprise in what later became southwestern Victoria state. The mountain was named Mount Eeles in 1836 by Major Thomas Mitchell after William Eeles of the 95th Regiment of Foot who fought with Mitchell in the Peninsular War. A draftsman's error meant that the name was rendered Eccles from 1845.
(Econ., 2/29/20, p.65)
35k BC - 23k BC In Australia Aboriginal rock paintings were made as far back as this time.
(SFEC, 2/28/99, p.T4)
35k BC - 10k BC The Upper Paleolithic Period. There was considerable variation in the types of tools that were used and according to prehistorian J.D. Clark, a new self-awareness or concern for matters that had no relation to fulfilling biological needs. This is shown by the burial of the dead together with food and weapons.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)(Enc. of Africa, 1976, p.165)
35k BC - 10k BC A rich Paleolithic site, Diuktai Cave, was discovered on the Aldan, a tributary of the Lena in Siberia by Dr. Yuri Mochanov ~1968.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.464)
34k BC A Neanderthal skeleton from this time was found near the village of St. Cesaire, France, in 1979. It indicated survival following a fractured skull.
(WSJ, 4/23/02, p.B1)
34k BC Researchers have confirmed that Neanderthals of this time in central France had more sophisticated stone tools than their predecessors. The tools may have been acquired by trade with Cro-Magnons. The site of the artifacts was Auxierre, France.
(SFC, 5/16/96, p.A-7)
33k BC In 2004 archaeologists of the University of Tuebingen said a 35,000BC-year-old flute made from a woolly mammoth's ivory tusk had been unearthed in a German cave and pieced together from 31 fragments. In 2009 a flute from about this same time, made from vulture bone, was displayed. Its 12 pieces had been found in the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany.
(AP, 12/11/04)(SFC, 6/25/09, p.A4)
33k BC Ivory carving dating to about this time depicted a busty woman. It was found in 2008 in a German cave and was unveiled in 2009 by archaeologists who believed it to be the oldest known sculpture of the human form. The carving found in six fragments in Germany's Hohle Fels cave depicts a woman with a swollen belly, wide-set thighs and large, protruding breasts.
(AP, 5/14/09)
33k BC About this time scattered hunter-gatherer groups underwent a cultural revolution. For the first time, humans began to create symbols of themselves, of the animals around them, and perhaps of the passage of time.
(NG, Oct. 1988 , p. 440)
c33k BC About this time, or more recently, a catastrophic earthquake carved out the Golden Gate and the waters of the Pacific rushed into the exposed plain to form the SF Bay. [see 8000BC]
(SFEC, 2/9/97, p.W4)
33k BC - 9k BC Europe's Upper Paleolithic age.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 440)
32k BC Late Neandertal skeleton excavated in 1979 CE at St. Cesaire in southwestern France, and studied by French anthropologist Bernard Vandermeersch. The associated stone tools found with the remains were those of Upper Paleolithic man, who displaced the Neanderthals.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p.615-616)
32k BC-30k BC In 2012 A team of Russian scientists revived a plant, Silene stenophylla, whose seeds came from a squirrel’s chamber in Siberian permafrost dating to this time.
(SFC, 2/21/12, p.A4)
32k BC - 21k BC In 2004 Some 70 clay hearths of this age were identified in a single cave in the northwestern Peloponnese.
(Arch, 1/05, p.13)
31k BC In the northern Moluccas humans were visiting the coastal caves of Golo and Wetef on Gebe Island at this time.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.21)
31k BC Stone tools from Monte Verde, Chile, indicate that people lived there about this time.
(SFC, 5/23/98, p.A13)
c30.4k BC Radiocarbon date for the Cave paintings at Chauvet, France. The first period of cave art is called Aurignacian.
(NH, 7/96, p.18,70)
30k BC An ivory pendant strung by a hole at the narrow end bears rows of dots, a common motif 32,000 years ago.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 451)
30k BC Carved body of a man whose arms bear striations was excavated from a cave at Hohlenstein, West Germany. The head is shaped as a lion muzzle.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.467)
30k BC - 22k BC This marks approximately the Gravettian cultural period. [see 26-20k]
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)
30k BC - 14k BC Scientists in 2007 said that prevailing winds in North America during this period blew from the East Coast. The Laurentide Ice Sheet covered much of the eastern two-thirds of the continent deep into the Midwest and the later Middle Atlantic states.
(SFC, 2/15/07, p.A20)
c29k BC Bones with Neanderthal traits from this time were later found in a cave in Mladec, Czech Republic. Some scientists believed they represented interbreeding between Neanderthals and Home Sapiens.
(SSFC, 6/19/05, p.F2)
29k BC Scientists in 2020 reported on artifacts found in a mountain cave in the state of Zacatecas in north-central Mexico. Limestone tools found at the site spanned from 31,000 to 12,500 years old, said archaeologist Ciprian Ardelean of Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas in Mexico, lead author of one of two studies published in the journal Nature.
(Reuters, 7/22/20)
28k BC In 2012 archaeologist Bryce Barker dated the oldest piece of rock art in Australia and one of the oldest in the world: an Aboriginal work created about this time in the Northern Territory rock shelter known as Nawarla Gabarnmang.
(AP, 6/18/12)
28k BC Neanderthals persisted to about this time at the site of Zafarraya in Andalucia, Spain.
(Arch, 9/00, p.53)
28k BC In 2010 it was reported that starch grains found on 30,000-year-old grinding stones suggest that prehistoric man may have dined on an early form of flat bread, contrary to his popular image as primarily a meat-eater. The grinding stones were discovered at sites in Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic.
(Reuters, 10/19/10)
28k BC In 2001 Russian and Norwegian archeologists reported evidence that date to about this time of humans camped at Mamontovaya Kurya on the Usa River at the Arctic circle. A tusk was dated at 36,600 years of age and plant remains at 30,000.
(SFC, 9/6/01, p.E2)
28k BC In 2003 Russian scientists reported evidence of a hunting site on the Yana River, Siberia, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle that dated to about this time.
(SFC, 1/2/04, p.A2)
28k BC The Ainu were the aboriginal inhabitants of the Japanese islands back to this time. They had European features, wavy hair and thick beards before they intermarried with the Japanese.
(SFC, 8/23/97, p.A10)
28k BC Homo sapiens (modern). Skull of adult male found by French workmen (L. Lartet) at Cro-Magnon, France in 1868.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 573)
28k BC The Cussac cave in France was found in 2000 to contain drawings from this time. Bones of 5 people from the Neolithic era were also found.
(SFC, 7/5/01, p.A8)
28.8k BC - 12.2k BC Analysis of core sediment from the bottom of Lake Pata in the western Amazon River basin in 1996 indicated that the area remained covered with lush tropical rain forest during this time of maximum glacial coverage in the northern latitudes.
(LSA, Spg/97, p.32)
27k BC In 2000 DNA analysis of a Neanderthal infant skeleton from this time showed a 7% difference in DNA to modern humans, which indicated that modern humans did not descend from them.
(SFC, 3/29/00, p.A8)(WSJ, 3/29/00, p.A1)
27k BC - 26k BC Neanderthals lived in Croatia. Their remains were later found at the Vindija cave and dated to this time in 1999 with accelerator radiocarbon dating.
(SFC, 10/26/99, p.B3)
26.5k BC The Oruanui eruption of the Taupo volcano in New Zealand took place about this time and was the world's largest known eruption in the past 70,000 years.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taupo_Volcano)(Econ., 4/11/15, p.24)
26k BC France's Dordogne Valley is the site of caves in Le Conte cliff where items such as the illustrated ivory bead or button have been found.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 451)
26k BC Experts in 2006 reported that charcoal evidence indicated that small bands of Neanderthals took refuge in Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar about this time.
(SFC, 9/14/06, p.A9)
26k BC In Sungir, an open-air settlement northeast of later-day Moscow, people were being buried with thousands of carved ivory beads and little wheel-shaped bone ornaments.
(Econ, 12/22/07, p.131)
26k BC - 20k BC This marks approximately the Gravettian (see 30-22k) cultural period. It was named after the southern French site of La Gravette.
(AM, 9/01, p.12)
26k BC - 16k BC Africa’s oldest known rock art dated to about this time at a site in Namibia.
(Econ, 5/3/08, p.56)
25k BC San Francisco and the Bay Area were home to mammoths indicating cold temperatures of an Ice Age. In 1934 a 10-pound mammoth tooth from this time was found by engineers working on the new Bay Bridge. In 1983 SF workers building the foundation of the Pansini Building at Pacific and Columbus found fossilized mammal bones that dated back to this time.
(SSFC, 1/15/09, DB p.43)(SFC, 8/3/13, p.C3)
25k BC In 2005 archaeologists in northern Austria reported finding the remains of two newborns dating back 27,000 years while excavating a hillside near Krems. The newborns were buried beneath mammoth bones and with a string of 31 beads, suggesting that the internment involved some sort of ritual.
(AP, 9/26/05)
25k BC In 2006 France took over ownership of a cave in the Vilhonneur forest where a human skeleton that dated to this time was found in a decorated room.
(SFC, 6/3/06, p.A2)
25k BC The earliest known atlatl dated to this time. This example from France of the device, use to throw a spear, was made of reindeer antler.
(Econ, 4/12/08, p.90)
25k BC Sand rock art from Namibia, part of an art exhibit of African Art, is dated to this period.
(WSJ, 11/16/95, p.A-18)
24k BC An early representation of a human was carved from mammoth ivory about 26,000 years ago. It was discovered in Brno, Czechoslovakia. The tiny "Venus of Dolni Vestonici," more than 25,000 years old, is the earliest known sculpture of a human figure.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 440)(SFEC, 5/23/99, DB p.43)
24k BC A multiple burial was unearthed at Dolni Vestonice, Czechoslovakia. Three skeletons whose skulls were adorned with circles of arctic fox and wolf teeth and ivory beads.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.466)
23k BC An ivory head known as the Venus of Brassenpouy named after the site of its recovery in France bears distinct facial features and coiffure. A bird bone flute of similar age is here illustrated.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 449)
23k BC Homo erectus survived in Indonesia to about this time.
(Arch, 1/05, p.14)
23k BC The oldest known baked clay figurine (11 cm) is from Dolni Vestonice, now at the Moravian museum.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 459)
23k BC Lake Bonneville crested and covered some 20,000 sq. miles over what is now Utah, Nevada, and Idaho.
(NH, 9/96, p.62)
23k BC Puget Sound off the state of Washington was carved by glaciers 25,000 years ago.
(AAM, 3/96, p.84)
23k BC - 10k BC The Sandia Cave in New Mexico provided human shelter back to this period and was excavated by archeologist Frank Hibben in the 1930s after it was discovered by Boy Scouts.
(SFEC, 5/30/99, p.T8)
23k BC - 18k BC The last glacial maximum took place over this period.
(SFC, 1/2/04, p.A2)
22.5k BC On Nov 28, 1998, Portuguese archeologists led by Dr. Joao Zilhao found the skeleton of a young boy (the Lagar Velho child) in the Lapedo Valley, who reportedly exhibited both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens features, the first possible hybrid to be found.
(SFEC, 4/25/99, p.A4)(AM, 7/00, p.25)
22000BC In 2017 it was reported that archeological studies at the Bluefish Caves in Canada’s Yukon territory showed evidence that animal bones dating to about this time had been stripped of their flesh by stone tools.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.70)
c22k BC The last ice age began and humans in Europe retreated to Spain, the Balkans and the Ukraine.
(SFC, 11/10/00, p.A7)
22k BC - 18k BC This marks approximately the Solutrian cultural period. Researcher in 1999 proposed that people of this culture crossed the Atlantic from the Iberian peninsula and settled on the eastern American seaboard.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)(SFC, 11/1/99, p.A9)
c21k BC In 2021 it was reported that human footprints found in New Mexico are about 23,000 years old, suggesting that people may have arrived long before the Ice Age’s glaciers melted.
(NY Times, 9/24/21)
c21k BC Plant remains from this time were found at the Ohalo II site on the shore of the Sea of Galilee indicating use of barley and perhaps other grains in the human diet.
(SFC, 6/22/04, p.A3)(SFC, 8/16/04, p.A6)(Econ, 8/7/04, p.65)
c21k BC In Mexico the Popocatepetl volcano erupted with a force equal to the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington.
(SFEC, 5/16/99, Z1 p.8)
21k BC - 18k BC In 2008 researchers reported that DNA evidence indicated that 95% of native Americans had descended from 6 women of this period. It was believed that the women had lived in Beringia, a land bridge that stretched from Asia to North America during this time.
(SFC, 3/14/08, p.A12)
21k BC - 18k BC The site of Kostenki by the River Don was inhabited for ~3,000 years when glaciers moved in. Shelters were built partly underground for warmth with large mammoth bones. The site was first excavated in 1879 CE and includes human burials, animal bones, female figures of limestone and ivory, necklaces of arctic fox teeth, and headbands of mammoth ivory.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 449)
20k BC In Australia scientists in 2005 said hundreds of human footprints dating back 20,000 years were discovered in a dry lake bed near Willandra Lakes, southwest of Sydney.
(Reuters, 12/21/05)
20k BC Some scientists believe that ancient people from Siberia crossed the Bering land bridge about this time and began their southward migration into the Americas. In 2001 skull measurements indicated that members of the Jomon-Ainu of Japan made the first crossings.
(SFC, 5/23/98, p.A13)(SFC, 7/31/01, p.A4)
20k BC-15k BC In 2019 archaeologists in Mexico found the bones of about 60 mammoths at an airport under construction just north of Mexico City, near human-built ’traps’. The bones were found in sediment layers corresponding to 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
(AP, 5/22/20)
20k BC - 10k BC This was a generally wet period.
(NH, 9/96, p.32)
20k BC - 5k BC In 2004 Stephen Mithen authored “After the Ice: A Global Human History," an account of human survival during this period.
(Arch, 1/05, p.54)
18k BC Innovations in weapon design included the spear thrower invented about this time.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 451)
c18k BC In 1999 a French-led expedition chopped clear the fully preserved carcass of a 20 thousand-year-old woolly mammoth, the "Jarkov Mammoth," from the permafrost of Siberia at Khatanga, Russia.
(SFC, 10/21/99, p.A1)
c18k BC Researchers in 1999 proposed that Solutrean people crossed the Atlantic from the Iberian peninsula and settled on the eastern American seaboard.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)(SFC, 11/1/99, p.A9)
c18k BC In Zimbabwe caves in the Matopos Hills were decorated with paintings.
(WSJ, 12/9/98, p.A13)
18k BC - 11k BC This marks approximately the Magdalenian cultural period. It was named after the site of La Madeleine, France, marked by fine art and tool-making and the use of bone for harpoons, spear points, and other purposes.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 489,495)
17.8k BC - 12.8k BC Tasmania, a Paleolithic site was filled with bones and stones and the charcoal from cooking hearths. The remains are 90% wallaby and 8% wombat.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.466)
17.5k BC Dr. D.J. Mulvaney in 1961 and 1964 unearthed human artifacts at Carnarvon National Park in Queensland, Australia, subsequently dated at 19,500 years.
(SF E&C, 1/15/1995, T-4)
17k BC A site at Meadowcroft ,Pa., has been carbon dated for human habitation to this age.
(USAT, 2/11/97, p.A1)
17k BC - 15k BC The Cactus Hill site, 45 miles south of Richmond, Va., was reported in 2000 to contain evidence of human settlers from this period.
(SFC, 4/7/00, p.A2)
16k BC The last major glaciation reaches its maximum. The English channel was dry; Australia adjoined Tasmania and New Guinea. Venice lay 200 miles from the sea.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 446)
16k BC A mile-high glacier covered the area of Connecticut.
(WSJ, 9/3/98, p.A16)
16k BC On Manhattan Island the ice was a half-mile thick. In western North America, the ice covered parts of Washington, Idaho, Montana, and all of Western Canada. In Europe it buried Scandinavia and Scotland, most of Great Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, much of Poland and much of the Soviet Union. In the Southern Hemisphere, there was ice in Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina. See levels fell by 350 feet.
(NOHY, Weiner, 3/90, p.102)
16k BC The glaciers in North America from New Jersey to Seattle began to recede.
(NH, 5/96, p.30)
16k BC The west coast of North America deglaciated by this time allowing people, who had crossed the Bering Strait land bridge, to move south.
(SFC, 4/4/08, p.A4)
16k BC In Sep, 2003, a 3-foot-tall adult female skeleton was found in a cave believed to be 18,000 years old. A trove of fragmented bones accounted for as many as seven primitive individuals that lived on the equatorial island of Flores, located east of Java and northwest of Australia. Scientists have named the extinct species Homo floresiensis. Scientists in 2005 said the group emerged some 95,000 years earlier and went extinct about 12,000 years ago. In 2009 new studies suggested the people, dubbed hobbits, were a previously unknown species altogether.
(AP, 10/27/04)(SFC, 10/28/04, p.A1)(SFC, 3/4/05, p.A2)(AP, 5/7/09)
16k BC - 9k BC Sculptures of stone, bone, ivory and clay record animals familiar to the Cro-Magnon peoples, whose artistic expertise peaked in France and Spain during this time.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 620)
15.59k BC Saber tooth cats roamed the hills north of Las Vegas about this time. Fossils of the front legs of such a cat were identified in 2012.
(SFC, 12/17/12, p.A5)
15k BC The Barents Sea ice sheet, stretching from northern England to Siberia, disintegrated in a period perhaps less than 1000 years, probably because of warming seas.
(Econ, 6/16/12, SR p.7)
15k BC The cave art of Paleolithic man of Lascaux, France dates to this time. It contains some 600 paintings, 1,500 engravings, and innumerable mysterious dots and geometric figures.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.434,485)
c15k BC The San Francisco west coast extended out 6 miles past the Farallon Islands.
(SFC, 12/20/99, p.A8)
c15k BC Dogs first began to associate with some humans as people began to form settlements.
(WSJ, 11/22/02, p.B1)
15k BC - 13k BC During the last Ice Age dams of glacial meltwater repeatedly failed and eroded land in southeastern Washington state and Oregon. This exposed petrified logs in what later became Gingko Petrified Forest State Park. An ice dam, which blocked the Clark Fork River in Montana and created lake Missoula, broke at least 40 times and caused cataclysmic floods. One Missoula flood left Portland under 400 feet of water.
(CW, Fall ‘03, p.20)(SSFC, 9/12/04, p.D9)
15k BC - 12k BC The Solutrean phase of the Upper Paleolithic is named after the Roche de Solutre near Macon, France.
(SFEC, 11/21/99, p.T4)
15k BC - 10k BC The Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age.
(WH, 1994, p.19)
14.6k BC - 14.1k BC A canine jaw, dating to this time, was found in Switzerland in 1873. Analysis in 2010 indicated the age of the bone and proved humans were keeping dogs at this time.
(SFC, 8/4/10, p.A2)
14.5k BC In 1962 Robert B. Fox, an American anthropologist of the National Museum of the Philippines, discovered fossilized fragments of a skull and jawbone of three individuals. These were believed to be the earliest human remains known in the Philippines. Tabon Man refers to these remains discovered in the Tabon Caves in Lipuun Point in Quezon, Palawan and dated back to about this time. In 2007 a metatarsal from the Callao Man was discovered and dated in 2010 by uranium-series dating as being 67,000 years old.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabon_Man)
14k BC A 35 cm (14-inch) stone head that seems to be half man and half lion or leopard, found in the El Juyo cave, in the foothills southwest of Santander, Spain. Anthropologists suggest the cave held a sanctuary for religious rituals.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 623)
14k BC Several thousand engravings are made at La Marche, France, mostly of animals but also including some humans.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 448)
14k BC The bas-relief of a bison on a limestone slab was found in a shelter at Angles-sur-l'Anglin, France.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 452)
14k BC The earliest fossils of domestic dogs date to this time. They were found in Germany.
(MT, Fall 02, p.14)
14k BC - 10k BC Rock art was inscribed in the Coso Mountains of California. In 2005 the area was designated as the Coso Rock Art National Historic Landmark.
(SSFC, 10/23/05, p.F12)
14k BC – 9k BC The Columbia mammoths, Mammuthus columbi, went extinct during this period. The species grew as tall as 14 feet and ranged widely in California. Remains were later found as far south as Florida and Central America.
(SFC, 3/31/11, p.A13)
13.5k BC A sandstone tablet from the Enlene cave in the French Pyrenees, excavated by R. Begouen and J. Clottes. Fragments were found between 1930 and 1983 and reveal possible human figures and a definite bison.
(NG. Nov. 1985, p. 618)
13.5k BC ¬- 11.2k BC In 2011 archeologists reported the discovery of 56 stone tools found in central Texas dating to about this time. The dating prefigured the “Clovis culture" by about 2 thousand years.
(SFC, 3/25/11, p.A7)
13k BC Archeologist Tom Dillehay and others believe that the first people arrived in the Americas about this time.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.62)
c13k BC Human teeth and skull fragments from the Pedra Faruda site of Piaui state, Brazil, were carbon dated to this time. Niede Guidon began excavations at the site in 1970.
(SFEC, 2/20/00, p.A18)
13k BC Early Natufian settlements began in the Middle East according to archeological evidence later found in Jordan. A drying climate from 10,800 BC to 9,500 BC made them nomadic again. A 2nd attempt to settle began around 9.500 BC and became known as Pre-Pottery Neolithic.
(Econ, 6/27/09, p.86)
13k BC An ivory plaque excavated at Malta in Siberia was designed with circles of dots, a possible indication of marking time.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 440)
13k BC About this time the Barents Ice Shelf, a vast piece of ice that sat north of Scandinavia, collapsed into the sea. It may have raised sea level by more than ten feet per century for nearly five centuries.
(NOHY, Weiner, 3/90, p.109)
13k BC The Lake Missoula Floods occurred as recently as 15,000 years ago.
(Smith., 4/95, p.50)
13k BC The Great Lakes originated about this time.
(NH, 7/98, p.68)
13k BC A supernova explosion occurred about 15,000 years ago that is revealed as the Cygnus Loop, the expanding blast wave of the explosion.
(NH, 8/96, p.72)
13k BC Mt. St. Helen's in Washington State erupted about this time. It left a sediment of ash in between layers of sediment from the glacial floods of Lake Missoula. This evidence indicates that there may have been as many as a hundred gigantic floods from Lake Missoula repeatedly breaking the glacial ice build-up.
(Smith., 4/1995, p.58)
13k BC -9.5k BC The Natufians were hunter-gatherers who lived in the eastern Mediterranean region during this period, and began settling down rather than roving from place to place. In 2018 Archaeologists reported finding what they believe is the world's oldest site for alcohol production in the Raqefet cave south of Haifa in today's northern Israel. The location also served as a burial site for the Natufian people. Their beer-like beverage may have been served in ceremonies around 11,000BC.
(AFP, 9/13/18)
13k BC - 8k BC Stanley J. Olsen, author of the "Origins of the Domestic Dog" (1985), posits that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers domesticated various subspecies of wolf during this time period in northern Europe, North America, the Near East and China.
(Nat. Hist. 3/96, p.36)
12.638k BC A very rapid sea level rise is thought to have occurred 14,650 years ago but details about the event have been unclear. In 2012 scientists said the collapse of an ice sheet in Antarctica about this time might have caused sea levels to rise between 14 and 18 meters (46-60 feet).
(Reuters, 3/29/12)
c12.5k BC The Altamira Cave in Spain and its wall paintings dated to this time. The cave was rediscovered in 1879 by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, a lawyer and amateur archeologist.
(WSJ, 9/18/01, p.A20)
12.5k BC-10.5k BC Paleolithic era cave drawings were created at the Atxurra cave in the northern Basque region during this period. Some 70 drawings in the cave were found in 2016 on ledges 1,000 feet underground.
(SFC, 5/28/16, p.A2)
12.3k BC In 2008 scientists reported that fossilized human feces found in 8 caves near Paisley, Ore., dated to about this time. The coprolites contained DNA with characteristics matching those of living Amerindians.
(SFC, 4/4/08, p.A4)(Econ, 4/5/08, p.84)
12k BC The last ice age ended about this time flooding the land bridge between Alaska and Siberia.
(SFC, 4/4/08, p.A4)
c12k BC The Broken Mammoth settlement in central Alaska dated to this time.
(SFC, 7/25/03, p.A1)
c12k BC In 2004 archaeologists in Kansas working near the Colorado-Kansas border reported radiocarbon dating results finished in February that showed mammoth and prehistoric camel bones dating back to about this time.
(AP, 6/13/05)
12k BC In 2008 evidence from Monte Verde, Chile, indicated that a small band of people inhabited the area. Initial evidence was found in a peat bog there in 1977.
(SFC, 5/9/08, p.A8)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde)
12k BC Bison are shaped from moist clay in the Tuc d'Audoubert cave of the French Pyranees, discovered in 1912 CE.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 443)
12k BC The Niaux cave in Tarascon, France, dated back to the Ice Age.
(SFEC, 5/30/99, p.T1)
12k BC As the earth warmed, the rain forest came up. It pushed away the wallabies, the wombats, the possums, and so the people (of Tasmania) had to follow their food.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.467)
c12k BC During the last ice age the Channel Islands off California were part of one vast island geologists call Santarosae. The northern islands were linked, but probably not with the mainland.
(SFEC, 4/26/98, p.T11)
12k BC Lake Lahontan, which spread across northwest Utah, reached its highest level during the last phase of the last Ice Age.
(NH, 9/96, p.35)
12k BC The first known fossil evidence of human-canine cohabitation dates to about this time.
(SFC, 6/13/97, p.A10)
12k BC - 10k BC A site along the Nile River in Sudan has a graveyard (Site 117) of this period that indicates warfare between communities.
(NH, Jul, p.31)
11.5k BC - 10.2k BC A site near Kenosha, Wisc., indicates human butchery of woolly mammoths during this period.
(Arch, 7/02, p.50)
11.05k BC - 10.9k BC Clovis points (from Clovis New Mexico), tools of Paleo-Indian hunters (known as Clovis people), were dated in 2007 to this period. They pursued ice-age mammoths, camels, bison and horses. These people were ancestral to the Folsom culture and were believed to have arrived across a land bridge from Asia. Clovis culture was reported to be very similar to Solutrean.
(NH, 2/97, p.22)(SFC, 11/1/99, p.A9)(Arch, 7/02, p.51)(SFC, 2/23/07, p.A4)
11k BC The last warming period began about 13,000 years ago. It melted the glaciers and put Beringia back under the Bering Sea.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.434)
11k BC A cooling period in the northern hemisphere, called the Younger Dryas, began about this time and lasted for over a thousand years.
(Econ, 5/26/07, p.94)
11k BC A mass extinction about this time occurred in parts of North America and coincided with the growing population of Indian hunters [see 10,900BC].
(SFC, 1/8/99, p.A2)
11k BC Scientists in 2005 said archeological sites dating to this time in Michigan, Canada, Arizona, New Mexico, and the Carolinas showed evidence, magnetic metal spherules, for a comet impact that may have wiped out North American mammoths and many other animals [see 10,900BC].
(SFC, 9/24/05, p.B2)
11k BC In 2008 Colorado landscapers in Boulder stumbled onto a cache of more than 83 ancient tools buried by the Clovis people, ice age hunter-gatherers, dating back 13,000 years.
(AP, 2/27/09)
11k BC Scientists in 2009 said an oak bush in the Jurupa Hills of Riverside County, Ca., was about 13,000 years old, dating to about this time.
(SFC, 12/23/09, p.A8)
11k BC Scientists in 2001-2002 discovered skeletons in caves along Mexico’s Yucatan coast that dated to about this time.
(SFC, 9/10/04, p.A2)
11k BC Peñon Woman, found in central Mexico in 1959, dated to about this time. She shared many of the features found in the Kennewick Man (1996) of Washington State.
(Econ, 7/16/05, p.77)
11k BC In 2007 Alberto Nava, a California cave diver, and two Mexican dive budies discovered a human skeleton in a deep underwater cave in Mexico’s Yucatan jungle. In 2014 scientists said the skeleton was that of a young girl who probably fell into the cave about this time. DNA evidence linked her to modern native Americans.
(SFC, 5/16/14, p.D8)
11k BC The earliest amber artifacts are from this time and were found in caves in Cheddar, England. The British Isles were connected to Europe and the English Channel could be walked across.
(PacDis, Winter/'97, p.9)
11k BC In 2016 Danish archaeologists found some hunting tools in Horsens dating to this time that gave insight into how some of the first people in Denmark lived.
(AP, 2/10/17)
11k BC A Paleolithic burial in San Teodoro Cave, Sicily, revealed an arrowhead embedded in the pelvis bone of an adult female. Another arrowhead is known from the vertebra of a child buried in the Grotte des Enfants on the Italian coast.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.24)
11k BC A meteorite from Mars (ALH 84001), discovered in 1984, landed in Antarctica about this time. It had been knocked into space from Mars around 16 million BC. Scientists in 1996 claimed to have found evidence of organic minerals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, in the meteorite that formed some 3.6 billion years ago.
(SFC, 8/7/96, p.A1,9)(SSFC, 2/19/06, p.M6)
11k BC-10k BC In 2014 scientists reported on a female skull, dating to about this time, found by divers at the Hoyo Negro Yucatan cave. They described her as Palaeoamerican, part of a small group whose remains do not resemble modern native Americans.
(Econ, 5/17/14, p.75)
11k BC - 9k BC A woman's bones were discovered in 1959 at Arlington Canyon on Santa Rosa Island, one of the Channel Islands off California. Two tests in 1999 dated the bones as 11,000 and 13,000 years of age.
(SFC, 4/12/99, p.A1,15)
11k BC - 4k BC Trinidad was once part of the South American continent. The lowlands to the continent flooded either after the melt of the last Ice Age or more recently from erosion caused by the Orinoco River of Venezuela.
(SFEC,2/16/97, p.T5)
10.9k BC Wildfires about this time broke out across the US and Canada after an object, roughly a kilometer across, grazed the Earth and broke up in the atmosphere depositing its oomph as heat. A mass extinction about this time occurred in parts of North America and coincided with the growing population of Indian hunters. Archeologists later identified a layer of charcoal and glass-like beads of carbon as evidence of the event. Fires melted substantial portions of the Laurentide glacier in Canada sending waves of water down the Mississippi that caused changes in the Atlantic Ocean currents. This started a 1,300-year ice age known as the Younger Dryas.
(SFC, 1/8/99, p.A2)(Econ, 5/26/07, p.94)(SFC, 1/2/09, p.A2)
10.8k BC - 10.3k BC A village in Monte Verde, Chile was identified to be this old by a team of anthropologists. The site is described in the 1997 book: "Monte Verde: A Pleistocene Settlement in Chile" by Tom Dillehay. Dillehay later reported that new excavations revealed evidence that human bones and tools may date back to about 28,000BC.
(USAT, 2/11/97, p.A1)(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.61)(SFC, 2/17/98, p.A2)
10.8k BC - 9.5k BC People of Early Natufian settlement in the Middle East were forced to go nomadic again due to a drying climate over this period. A 2nd attempt to settle began around 9,500 BC and became known as Pre-Pottery Neolithic.
(Econ, 6/27/09, p.86)
10.7k BC Melting glaciers caused a deluge of some 2,000 cubic miles of fresh water from a prehistoric lake in southwestern Ontario. This impacted the Atlantic thermohaline circulation and sent temperatures over the North Atlantic plummeting. Temperatures in Greenland dropped by 18 degrees Fahrenheit.
(WSJ, 7/17/03, p.A1)(WSJ, 5/14/04, p.B1)
c10.5k BC The climate of the Earth abruptly warmed by 20 degrees or more and ended an ice age. Ice cores from Greenland later revealed a temperature increase of almost 59 degrees in the north polar region within a 50-year period.
(SFC, 10/2/98, p.A10)
10.4k BC - 10.2k BC In 2003 Scientists reported that human bone fragments found in a cave from Aveline's Hole in the Mendip Hills of southwest England date from this period.
(AP, 9/23/03)
10.3k BC In 2021 it was reported that scientists have unearthed evidence of a milestone in human culture, the earliest-known use of tobacco, in the remnants of a hearth built by early inhabitants of North America's interior about this time in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert. Until then, the earliest documented use of tobacco came in the form of nicotine residue found inside a smoking pipe from Alabama dating to 3,300 years ago.
(Reuters, 10/11/21)
10k BC The Paleolithic period comes to a close.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 623)
10k BC The Nez Perce are a North American Indian people of the Sahaptin family. The name is from the French and means pierced nose. They lived in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon, Washington and Idaho for some 12,000 years.
(WUD, 1994, p.964)
10k BC Little Petroglyph and an adjacent canyon in the Coso Mountains, northwest of the Mojave Desert, contains carvings dated to this time.
(PacDis, Summer '97, p.8,10)
c10k BC Petroglyphs dating to this time were later discovered in the Big Smokey Valley of Nevada, where Lake Tolyabe and Lake Tonopah provided for human habitation.
(USDI, 2004)
10k BC The 1st known outbreaks of smallpox occurred about this time among agricultural settlements in northeastern Africa.
(SFC, 10/19/01, p.A17)
10k BC This marks the approximate time of the Natufian cultural stage, just before the domestication of plants and the spread of settled farming groups. The Natufians were the last group to occupy Kebara cave in Israel for a long period.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.463)
c10k BC Hunter gatherers settled for part of the year at a site later called Wadi Hammeh in the Jordan Valley.
(NH, 11/1/04, p.15)
10k BC In 2008 archeologists in northern Israel found a female skeleton in a grave containing 50 tortoise shells, a leopard pelvis, a cow tail and part of an eagle wing and believed they were the remains of a witch doctor from the Natufian culture.
(AP, 11/18/08)
10k BC Ice from this period is stored at the Physics Inst. of the Univ. of Bern, Switzerland.
(NOHY, 3/1990, p.240)
10k BC Austronesians began to settle the island of Taiwan about this time. Their descendents became known as the aboriginal Seediq people.
(Econ, 9/17/11, p.41)
10k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
10k BC The world’s human population was about 5 million.
(Econ, 12/24/05, Survey p.9)
10k BC - 3.5k BC The Neolithic or New Stone Age.
(WH, 1994, p.19)
10k BC - 400 BC The Jomon culture of Japan is associated with the introduction of rice agriculture and the use of metal and probably came from the Asian mainland.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.34)
10k BC – 1.5k AD The Bachwezi people, also known as the Ancient Cwezi or Chwezi, were a group of people who legends say ruled the Empire of Kitara (Empire of the Sun), which encompassed a vast area including modern day Uganda, Sudan, northern Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia and Malawi during this period.
(http://tinyurl.com/uov9agu)
9.58k BC The Shigir Idol, a nine-foot-tall totem pole, was carved about this time near Kirovgrad, Russia. In 1890 it was dug out of a peat bog by gold miners. In 2014 advanced technology yielded dated the idol to about this time as Eurasia was still transitioning out of the last ice age.
(NY Times, 3/23/21)
9k BC Canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) is believed to have originated about this time in a single dog. By 2016 it was found in dogs worldwide.
(Econ, 5/21/16, p.70)
9.6k BC Radiocarbon date for the cave paintings at Le Portal, France. The last period of cave art is called Magdalenian.
(NH, 7/96, p.18)
9.6k BC A site of human habitation in Peru was dated to about this time. Later excavations indicated complex stone tools that appeared to date back to at least 28,000BC.
(SFC, 2/17/98, p.A2)
9.6k BC - 8.5k BC Some dozen villages piled one on top of the other occupied the site of Jerf el-Ahmar at a bend of the Euphrates River. In 1999 Syria flooded the area under the Tishrin Dam.
(AM, 11/00, p.56)
9.5k BC In 2011 scientists identified the cremated bones, dating to about this time, of a 3-year-old child buried in the Tanana lowlands of central Alaska.
(SFC, 2/25/11, p.A8)
c9.5k BC A female skull, aged 20-25, from this period was found near Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in c1995 and named Luzia. It was found to have characteristics similar to people from the South Pacific.
(SFC, 5/23/98, p.A13)
9.5k BC Romito 2, a dwarf from a cave in Italy's Calabria region, suffered from a form of chondrodystrophy, a lack of normal cartilage growth and stood no more than four feet. That he lived to about 17 years of age indicates group support. He was found buried with an old woman, possibly his mother.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 452)
c9.5k BC Two cultures of migrating hunters lived in the present territory of Lithuania in the 2nd half of the 10th millennium BC. One group came from the banks of the middle Vistula river in the south-west. The other was from the north-west of Europe.
(DrEE, 10/12/96, p.2)(TB-Com, 10/11/00)
9.5k BC People of the Early Natufian settlements in the Middle East began to settle for a 2nd time following 1300 years of drying climate. They became known as Pre-Pottery Neolithic.
(Econ, 6/27/09, p.86)
9.5k BC - 6.1k BC The Neolithic site of Abu Hureyra, 40 miles downstream from Jerf el-Ahmar, Syria, was flooded under the waters of the Taqba Dam in the 1970s.
(AM, 11/00, p.58)
9.4k BC - 9.2k BC In 2006 researchers reported the discovery of nine carbonized fig fruits stored in Gilgal I, an early Neolithic village, located in the Lower Jordan Valley, which dated to this time.
(Reuters, 6/2/06)
9k BC Humans reached Florida at least by this time, before the end of the Ice Age. Sea level was lower and the peninsula was much larger.
(NH, 11/96, p.46)
9k BC Harpoon heads of intricate design were in use by this time. They were hafted to wooden shafts and easily replaced.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 451)
9k BC The wooly mammoth became extinct about 11,000 years ago. [article about the atlatl, i.e. spear thrower]
(WSJ, 10/24/95, p.A-1)
9k BC Fisher in the late 1980's, while he was excavating an 11,000-year-old mastodon found at the Heisler site in southern Michigan, found evidence of butchery and under water meat caching by Ice Age hunters in North America.
(LSA, Fall 1995, p.38)
9k BC Caribou lived in the area of Connecticut.
(WSJ, 9/3/98, p.A16)
9k BC Archeologists in 2010 reported that a circular shaped home was built about this time next to an ancient lake at Star Carr, near Scarborough, in northeastern England. At this time Britain was still connected to continental Europe.
(AP, 8/11/10)(SFC, 8/12/10, p.A2)
c9k BC Plato later wrote that the island continent of Atlantis existed about this time. In 1998 Richard Ellis wrote an account of the Atlantis literature: "Imagining Atlantis."
(SFEC, 7/26/98, BR p.3)
9k BC In 2007 French archaeologists discovered an 11,000-year-old wall painting underground in northern Syria which they believe is the oldest in the world. The 2 square-meter painting, in red, black and white, was found at the Neolithic settlement of Djade al-Mughara on the Euphrates, northeast of the city of Aleppo.
(Reuters, 10/11/07)
9k BC The town of Chemi Shanidar, later part of Iraq, was the largest city of the time with 150 people.
(SFEC, 8/27/00, Z1 p.2)
9k BC Human middens began piling up along the coast of Peru reflecting a diet of tropical mollusks.
(SFC, 9/13/96, p.A2)
c9k BC - 8k BC In Neolithic times Mongolia was the home of small groups of hunters, reindeer breeders, and nomads.
(www.gobiexpeditions.com)
9k BC - 4k BC The finest record of Mesolithic and Neolithic peoples exists in Denmark, due to the country's numerous bogs.
(PacDis, Winter/'97, p.9)
8.6k BC Irish Elk (Megaloceros giganteus) lived in temperate climates throughout Europe and western Asia from about this time to a last record in Ireland at 10,600 years ago.
(NH, 8/96, p.17)
8.2k BC Archaeologists in 2007 found tools in the seabed off Cyprus at two sites indicating they were used by seafaring foragers who frequented the island well over 10,000 years ago, before the first permanent settlers arrived around 8,200 BC.
(AP, 7/19/07)
8.024k BC In 1976 scientists in southern California scientists unearthed skeletal remains dating to about this time. They were among the oldest ever found in the Western Hemisphere.
(AP, 1/15/12)
8k BC The Holocene (completely-recent) Epoch, our current age began 10,000 years ago.
(CEH, GHMC,1979, p.24)(LSA, Spg/97, p.6)
8k BC In 1958 anthropologist Frank Livingstone proposed that Plasmodium falciprum, the deadliest of 4or 5 parasites that cause human malaria, hopped from chimps to humans about this time and human hunter-gatherers began settling on farms.
(Econ, 8/8/09, p.69)
8k BC In 2007 new genetic analysis suggested that the transformation of a vicious predator into a docile tabby took place about this time in the remote deserts of the Middle East.
(www.livescience.com/animals/070628_cat_family.html)
8k BC About this time Vulcan’s Throne was formed from a volcanic eruption near the rim of the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon over Toroweap Canyon, Az.
(NH, 9/97, p.40)
8k BC In 2007 workers digging at the future site of a Wal-Mart store in suburban Mesa, Az., unearthed the bones of a prehistoric camel that's estimated to be about 10,000 years old.
(AP, 4/28/07)
8k BC Researchers in 1986 dated a clay floor in Stanislaus National Forest, 150 miles east of SF, to this time.
(SFC, 9/19/97, p.A3)
8k BC About 10,000 years ago a tribe of Indians lived in the Florida panhandle at the Aucilla River for a few generations near the present town of Perry. The site was nearly 100 miles inland. Within a hundred years rising water flooded the village and sealed the remains under a layer of clay.
(SFC, 11/11/96, p.D1)(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.17)
8k BC In Nevada about this time the Lathrop Wells Cone erupted. It is less than a mile from Yucca Mountain, a site later proposed for the long-term storage of radioactive waste.
(Smith., 5/95, p.44)
8k BC Early bison hunters of the American southwest were named the Folsom People after a nearby town. Bones of the Bison antiquus were initially discovered by cowboy George McJunkin in 1908 in eastern New Mexico.
(NH, 2/97, p.17)
8k BC Mastodons roamed over Ohio. In 1887 Newton S. Conway discovered the skeleton of a mastodon on his farm on the Clark-Champaign County line. It became known as the Conway Mastodon.
(SSFC, 1/9/11, p.A10)(http://tinyurl.com/2ecv34t)
8k BC In 1903 the skeleton of a man, 10,000 years old, was discovered in the underground caves at Cheddar, 130 miles west of London, England. In 2018 scientists from Britain's Natural History Museum and University College London said DNA from the skeleton, named "Cheddar Man," suggests the oldest-known Briton had dark skin and blue eyes.
(SFC, 3/8/96, p.A8)(AP, 2/7/18)
8k BC A genetic mutation among northern Europeans about this time made lactose tolerance continue beyond childhood.
(WSJ, 2/12/0/09, p.A11)
8k BC Asian peoples settled the island of Taiwan about this time.
(SSFC, 2/18/07, p.G6)
8k BC In Taiwan twined hemp cord was decoratively pressed into the side of clay vessels. As of 2015 this was the earliest known use of hemp.
(SSFC, 1/18/15, p.E6)
8k BC It is believed that the Chinese became to first to domesticate wild boars about this time.
(Econ, 12/20/14, p.68)
8k BC About this time Thingvallavatn Lake, a flooded graben in southwestern Iceland, was born in a valley gauged from volcanic rock and ash by the Langjokull Glacier.
(NH, 6/96, p.48)
c8k BC Traces of a man-made shelter from this time were found in northern South Africa north of Johannesburg.
(SFC, 1/15/99, p.A14)
8k BC The potato was first cultivated some 10,000 years ago by South American Indians. In the 16th century Spanish explorers brought potatoes back to Europe, where it was first used primarily as livestock feed. The potato was introduced to North America in the 17th century. In the 18th century, the poor of Europe began to use potatoes as a replacement for cereals in their diets. The failure of the potato crop in Ireland in 1845-46 led to great famine and pushed tens of thousands of Irish to emigrate to the United States. In 2008 it was reported that genetic studies by potato experts indicated that all potatoes originated over 10,000 years ago from a single ancestor, Solanum brevicaule, found on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca.
(HNQ, 5/10/98)(SSFC, 10/5/08, p.A15)
c8k BC The West Antarctic ice sheet started retreating at a rate of about 2 inches per year.
(SFC, 1/3/03, p.A7)
8k BC There is good evidence that the continental crust is capable of some plastic flow, and the rebound is shown most dramatically in parts of the Baltic, the Arctic and the Great Lakes regions of North America where Pleistocene beaches and coastal features are now raised high above sea level and some are tilted. The process seems to have been going on for the last 10,000 years and is still continuing.
(DD-EVTT)
8k BC Sand of Ocean Beach and on hills of western San Francisco. Alluvium of river bottoms. Silts and muds of Sacramento Delta.
(GH-CEH, p.25)
c8k BC Rising ocean waters flowed into the Golden Gate and formed the nascent SF Bay.
(SFC, 12/20/99, p.A8)
8k BC Pigmy mammoths browsed on the Channel Islands off the California coast.
(SFEC, 1/18/98, Z1 p.1)
8k BC Grinding tools from this time were found in 1999 in the Cross Creek site of San Luis Obispo. Beads, shells, tools, seeds and carved stone fish suggested that humans came to the area by sea and did not rely on hunting for subsistence.
(SFC, 6/25/99, p.A6)
8k BC Wine was produced in the region known as Colchis (later Georgia) as early as this time.
(Econ, 11/15/08, p.100)
8k BC The 15-foot, 3-toed Macrauchenia, a native of Patagonia, went extinct about this time. It had a body like a camel, a neck like a giraffe, and a flexible nose like an elephant’s trunk. Its fossil was discovered by Charles Darwin during his trip to the region (1833-1834).
(SFC, 4/2/10, p.C5)
8k BC About this time the inhabitants of Mesopotamia (centered about modern Iraq) began using distinctively shaped clay tokens- spheres, disks, cones, cylinders, triangles, among others- to keep track of foodstuffs, livestock, and land.
(I&I, Penzias, p.42)(V.D.-H.K.p.10)
8k BC Tel Sultan, an archaeological dig, indicated that Jericho was first settled about this time.
(AP, 10/1/10)
c8k BC - 7k BC In the early Mesolithic the climate warmed and settlers of the Paleolithic followed the deer north. Those who stayed mixed with the fisherman who moved from the west to form the ethnic groups of Baltic culture.
(DrEE, 10/12/96, p.2)(TB-Com, 10/11/00)
8k BC - 6.5k BC A few gigantic pine posts, possibly totem poles, were raised at Stonehenge during this period. New research in 2013 suggested that the ancient structures may perhaps have been raised to honor a sacred hunting ground.
(Live Science, 4/24/13)
8k BC - 1.5k BC This period is covered by Barry Cunliffe in his 2001 book: “Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples 8000BC - 1500 AD.
(Arch, 7/02, p.20)
c7.975k BC Humans lived in a cave near Oaxaca, Mexico, named Guila Naquitz (White Cliff). Scattered remains of tools, seeds and plants were found in 1966 by archeologist Kent Flannery and some of the seeds were dated to this time. The squash seeds showed signs of cultivation.
(SFC, 5/9/97, p.A2)
7.542k BC In 2008 Umeaa University said the world's oldest living tree on record, a spruce, took root about this time in central Sweden.
(AP, 4/17/08)
7.5k BC Pre-historic Indians inhabit areas of N. Cascades in Washington state at elevations of 6,600 ft. It appears that the local chert was used to fabricate stone tools.
(NG March 1990, Geographica)
7.5k BC The Illinois River Valley, where humans have lived since this time lost 5-10% of its archeological record in the great Mississippi flood of 1994 CE.
(NG, Geographica, Jan, 94)
c7.5k BC The Twin Dutch Site in Illinois is the location of the oldest house in the Midwest US.
(SFEC, 11/24/96, C17)
c7.5k BC A research team in 2004 uncovered a carefully buried cat on Cyprus, placed just inches from a human burial that also contained polished stones, shells, tools and jewelry. The graves were estimated to be 9,500 years old.
(AP, 4/9/04)
7.5k BC In 2001 Indian engineers began dredging operations in the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay) and pulled up human fossil bones, fossil wood, stone tools, pieces of pottery and many other things that indicated that a human habitation site dating to about this time.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_archaeology_in_the_Gulf_of_Cambay)
7.5k BC - 7k BC Evidence of human habitation has been found from this time at El Portal in Yosemite.
(SFEC, 5/18/97, Z1 p.4)
c7.4k BC In 1998 specimens of sandals were analyzed from a Missouri cave that dated to this time.
(SFC, 7/3/98, p.A2)
7.4k BC The mummy, known as the Spirit Cave Man, was found in Nevada in 1940, but in 1996 was dated to be more than 9,400 years old. The mummy was discovered by archeologists S.M. and Georgia Wheeler in a cave 13 miles east of Fallon. The mummy was wrapped in a skin robe and sewn into two mats woven of a marsh plant called tule.
(SFC, 4/27/96, p.A-5)
c7k BC Some American Indian graves in Newport Beach, CA., were believed to be this age.
(SFC, 3/10/97, p.A16)
7k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
c7k BC A flute dating to this time was found in the 1980s in Jiahu. 6 flutes from the hollow wing bones of cranes were found in Zheng-zhou province from about this time.
(SFC, 9/23/99, p.A8)(SFC, 4/29/00, p.D4)
7k BC Scientists in 2004 found the earliest evidence of winemaking from pottery shards dating from 7,000BC in northern China.
(Reuters, 12/7/04)(SFC, 12/7/04, p.A1)
c7k BC Early Danish Mesolithic: In the Maglemose culture large amber pendants were hardly changed.
(PacDis, Winter/'97, p.8)
c7k BC The Ain Ghazal farming settlement in Jordan dated to this time. It was uncovered in 1974 during road construction near Amman.
(SSFC, 11/9/03, p.C7)
7k BC Archaeologists in 2022 discovered a stone age site dating to about this time in a remote desert in Jordan, with structures which show humans were rounding up and hunting gazelles much earlier than previously thought.
(Reuters, 2/23/22)
c7k BC Stone masks, dating to about this time, were later discovered in the Judean desert and hills near Jerusalem. In 2014 eleven stone masks were put on exhibit and offered a rare glimpse at some of civilization's first communal rituals.
(AP, 3/11/14)
7k BC In 2012 a group of Swedish marine archeologists said they have found what they believe could be the world's oldest stationary fishing traps on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, with the most ancient dating back about this time.
(AP, 6/5/12)
7k BC The site of Catalhoyuk in south-central Turkey was settled about this time and vanished after about 1,200 years. It marks the world’s first urban center.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.72)(SFC, 4/18/05, p.A6)
7k BC The first regular milking of animals was begun in the Sahara about this time.
(SFEC,11/2/97, Z1 p.6)
7k BC The Sami people began herding reindeer in northern Europe about this time as the last Ice Age ended. They were later considered to be Europe’s only indigenous people. By 2013 they numbered about 80,000 including 8,000 in Finland, 50,000 in Norway, 20,000 in Sweden and 2,000 in Russia.
(SFC, 8/30/13, p.A2)
c6.8k BC Jarmo in northern Iraq was later said to be the first town.
(SFEC, 7/16/00, Z1 p.2)
6.5k BC A skeleton of about this age was found in July, 1996, by the Columbia River in Kennewick, Wa. It became known as the "Kennewick Man" or "Richland Man." The 9,200 year old bones were later studied and determined to be most closely related to Asian people, particularly the Ainu of northern Japan. It was concluded in 2000 that he was an American Indian. The bones were dated to 7514-7324 BC. DNA testing in 2015 showed a close relationship to the Colville tribe in Washington state and dated him to about 6,500BC.
(SFC, 10/16/99, p.A11)(SFC, 1/14/00, p.A7)(SFC, 9/26/00, p.A5)(Econ, 7/16/05, p.76)(SFC, 6/19/15, p.A18)(Econ, 6/20/15, p.33)
6.38k BC Swedish archaeologists in 2020 reported finding the remains of a dog at a human burial site dating to about this time in southern Sweden. The dog was buried with a person near the town of Solvesborg.
(AP, 9/24/20)
6.2k BC The archeological record shows traces of domesticated cattle back to this time.
(Acad, Jul/Aug 1996)
6.2k BC In Germany the Adonis of Zschernitz, a male fertility figurine dating to this time, was excavated near Leipzig in 2003. In 2005 a female counterpart was found at the same site.
(SFC, 8/17/09, p.12)
6.2k BC The development of irrigation in Mesopotamia at this time seems to coincide with a cool dry period.
(Econ, 12/20/03, p.114)
6.2k BC The glacial lake Agassiz-Ojibway, body of water so vast that it covered parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, Ontario and Minnesota, massively drained, sending a flow of water into the Hudson Strait and the Labrador Sea. The sudden flood of fresh water diluted the saltiness of the Gulf Stream weakening its flow.
(Econ, 9/9/06, Survey p.6)(AFP, 2/24/08)
6k BC Carbon levels began to rise about this time and caused a deviation in the climatic patterns called the Milankovitch cycles. These cycles were regulated by the Earth's orbit and angle towards the sun.
(Econ, 12/20/03, p.115)
6k BC The Wappo Indians settle in the area northern California around Mt. Konocti 8,000 years ago. The eruption of Mt. Konocti millions of years earlier left a fissure in the earth through which ground water reaches the hot magma at 4,000 feet, and resurfaces as Indian Springs' three thermal geysers at 212 degrees. The water rises through old sea beds adding rich mineral and salt traces.
(Flyer on Indian Springs, 7/95)
c6k BC The Hokan Indians preceded the Miwoks in Northern California.
(SFEC, 10/4/98, p.B5)
c6k BC Remains of a probable human structure in Hells Gap, Wyoming, were dated to this time.
(SFC, 9/19/97, p.A3)
c6k BC A more advanced Neolithic people migrated to Europe from the Middle East bringing with them a new Y chromosome pattern and an agricultural way of life.
(SFC, 11/10/00, p.A7)
6k BC In 2010 Israeli archaeologists uncovered the remains of an 8,000-year-old prehistoric building as well as ancient flint tools in the modern city of Tel Aviv.
(AP, 1/11/10)
6k BC The site of Lepenski Vir on the Danube River at the Iron Gates gorges was occupied by people living in huts. Sculpted boulders at the site represent the first monumental art from central and eastern Europe.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.24)
c6k BC Bronze age settlements were established and later found in Moldova.
(SFC, 1/28/97, p.A5)
6k BC Ash from ancient campfires of this time were found in Muscat, Oman, in 1983.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.48)
c6k BC Lead beads were fashioned in Anatolia by craftsmen whose forced-air furnaces were able to reach 1,100 degrees, the melting point of galena, a common mineral of lead.
(NH, 7/96, p.50)
c6k BC The milodon, a giant sloth, became extinct in South America.
(SFEC, 11/24/96, T6)
6k BC Researchers in 2007 reported that evidence for the use of chili peppers date back to this time in Ecuador. Botanists if general agreed that chili peppers originated in Bolivia. Evidence for early use was also found in the Bahamas, Colombia, Panama, Peru and Venezuela.
(SFC, 2/16/07, p.A7)
6k BC In 2008 scientists reported that robust hunter-gathers, known as Kiffians, apparently abandoned the Gobero region of Niger during a long drought that dried up a lake about this time. The dried-up lake in the Sahara was found brimming with the skeletons of people, fish and crocodiles who thrived when the African desert was briefly green.
(Reuters, 8/15/08)
6k BC The last wooly rhino died about this time.
(Econ, 8/24/13, p.72)
6k BC In 2022 it was reported that mummification of the dead probably was more common in prehistory than previously known. A new discovery at hunter-gatherer burial sites in the Sado Valley in Portugal, dated to about this time, showed evidence for pre-burial treatments such as desiccation through mummification.
(Science Daily, 3/4/22)
6k BC - 5.5k BC In 2005 archaeologists in northern Greece uncovered traces of two prehistoric farming settlements dating back to this period.
(AP, 11/28/05)
6k BC - 4k BC The Pleistocene-Holocene date line, i.e. the 'end' of the glacial epoch, is perhaps best marked at the end of the last rapid rise in sea level between 6 & 8 thousand years ago.
(DD-EVTT, p.298)
5700BC In Oregon the 12,000 foot Mt. Mazama blew up and collapsed about this time. Its gaping crater filled rainfall and snowmelt creating what is now called Crater Lake.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Mazama)(SSFC, 5/27/18, p.M6)
c5.6k BC The Mediterranean Sea, swollen be melted glaciers, breached a natural dam that separated it from the fresh water lake later known as the Black Sea. Sea water from the Mediterranean poured in for as long as 2 years. An ancient coastline with this date was verified in 1999. [see 2348BC]
(SFC, 9/28/99, p.A14)(SFC, 11/18/99, p.C6)(SFC, 9/13/00, p.A7)
5.5k BC Hahnhofersand Man was dated in 2001 to about this time by Oxford University’s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. German Prof. Reiner Protsch von Zieten had earlier dated the fossils to about 34,300BC. In the 1980s the Hahnhofersand fossils were said to have both Neanderthal and human characteristics.
(Arch, 5/05, p.15)
5.5k BC Scientists in 2012 presented evidence of cheese making in pottery sieves discovered in Poland that dated to about this time.
(SSFC, 12/16/12, p.A22)
5.5k BC People sweeping out from Turkey colonized Europe, likely as a part of the agricultural revolution, reaching Germany about 7,500 years ago.
(Live Science, 4/23/13)
5.5k BC - 4k BC In Japan the Sannai Maruyama site in northern Honshu uncovered postholes of houses and longhouses, graves, figurines and animal remains of the early to middle Jomon period.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.72)
5.4k BC - 5k BC Archeologists have determined that wine was made in villages in Iran's remote Zagros Mountains about this time. Wine jars were dug up near the ruined village called Hajii Firuz Tepe and analyzed to have contained a retsina type of wine.
(SFC, 6/6/96, p.A3)(Reuters, 12/7/04)
5.2k BC - 4.5k BC In 2008 Egypt’s supreme council of antiquities said a team of US archaeologists had discovered the ruins of a city dating back to this period of the first farmers in the Fayyum oasis.
(AFP, 1/29/08)
c5.1k BC A slate plaque from pre-dynastic Egypt was carved with scenes of battlefield carnage on one side and leaf munching antelope on the other. It was part of an exhibit at the Guggenheim.
(NYT, 6/7/96, p.B9)
c5.1k BC In 2001 evidence in Mexico was reported for corn cultivation from sediments of this time.
(SFC, 5/18/01, p.A7)
5k BC War had become endemic in almost all human societies.
(V.D.-H.K.p.408)
5k BC In 2015 scientists reported evidence of a massacre near Frankfurt, Germany, dating to about this time. Skeletal remains in a mass grave of some 26 men, women and children indicated blunt-force marks to the head, arrow wounds smashed shins.
(SFC, 8/18/15, p.A2)
5k BC Since the last glacial phase, an interglacial had been in effect, beginning about this time.
(DD-EVTT, p.301)
5k BC The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act gives large portions of prime bear habitat to the Alutiiq people, who have hunted and fished on the island for 7,000 years.
(NG, Jan. 94, p.141)
5k BC Native people were traveling through the Barrens, northwest of Canada's Hudson's Bay,
(NH, 5/96, p.35)
5kBC The Chinchorro, hunter-gatherers in Chile’s Atacama Desert, began mummifying their dead about this time.
(SFC, 8/15/12, p.A7)
c5k BC A complex of slabs and stones in southern Egypt that may date this far back was found during field work that ended in 1997. The site included 10 slabs, some 9 feet tall, 30 rock-lined ovals, 9 burial sites for cows, and a "calendar circle" of stones. They were thought to have been constructed by cattle-herders and used for astronomical observations.
(SFC, 4/2/98, p.A6)
5k BC In 2008 archeologists reported the discovery of a farming village in Egypt’s Faiyum Oasis, 50 miles south of Cairo, that dated to about this time. Residents grew wheat and barley, and raised sheep, goats and pigs.
(SFC, 2/13/08, p.A11)
5k BC In 2018 Egypt's Antiquities Ministry said a Neolithic site has been discovered in Tell el-Samara, about 140 km (87 miles) north of Cairo. A team found silos containing animal bones and food, indicating human habitation as early as 5,000 BC.
(AP, 9/2/18)
5k BC An international team of researchers in 2019 said they have discovered a 7,000-year-old-seawall along Israel's Mediterranean coast, providing evidence that coastal communities protected themselves against rising waters even in ancient times. The seawall, found about 120 meters (130 yards) off the coast, is the only structure of its kind found in Israel's coastal region. The Neolithic era village, called Tel Hreiz, was abandoned and eventually swallowed by the sea.
(AP, 12/19/19)
5k BC Dried-up riverbeds as well as cave paintings indicate that at this time the Sahara was a land of flowing rivers, lush green pastures, and forests.
(ATC, p.108)
5k BC Stone age farmers and fisherman inhabited the area around Byblos, Lebanon. Archeologists at Byblos found at least 12 layers of civilizations that dated back 7,000 years.
(NG, Aug., 1974, p.154)(SFEC, 4/13/97, p.T9)
5k BC Shell and fishbone middens indicated a fishing village of this time at Ras al Hamra in Qurum, Oman.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.48)
5k BC On Malta the Ghar Dalam cave near the harbor of Marsaxlokk revealed bones of domesticated animals and potsherds.
(AM, Jul/Aug '97 p.42)
c5k BC Research in 2003 indicated that bananas and taro were cultivated in the highlands of Papua New Guinea as long as 7,000 years ago. The first signs of human habitation in the area occurred c5,800BC and included a change from forest to grasslands and increase in charcoal in the sediments. The earliest Asian influence on the islands occurred about 1,500BC.
(AP, 6/19/03)
5k BC The Thracian village of Nebet Tepe, later Plovdiv, Bulgaria, dated to about this time. It was redeveloped by the Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Bulgars and Turks.
(SSFC, 7/16/06, p.G4)
5k BC The human population was about 5 million at this time.
(SFEC, 9/19/99, Z1 p.3)
5k BC - 3.5k BC The predynastic period of Egypt.
(R4,1998)
5k BC - 3k BC Pinto Man, a Native American nomad, left arrow points in the desert basin near Twenty-Nine Palms in Southern California.
(Sp., 5/96, p.64)
5k BC - 2.5k BC Scientists in 2008 said a second group settled the Gobero region of Niger during this period. These were Tenerians, smaller, shorter people who hunted, herded and fished.
(Reuters, 8/15/08)
4.8k BC - 4.6k BC More than 150 large temples, constructed between during this period, were unearthed in fields and cities in Germany, Austria and Slovakia in 2002-2005. A village at Aythra, near Leipzig in eastern Germany, was home to some 300 people living in up to 20 large buildings around the temple.
(AP, 6/12/05)
4.713k BC The most recent time that the three major chronological cycles (28 year solar, 19 year lunar, and 15 year Roman Indication) began on the same day as determined by Joseph Scaliger in 1582.
(CFA, '96,Vol 179, p.23)
4.5k BC In 2014 San Francisco construction workers discovered human remains at the site of the new Transbay Transit Center that dated to about this time.
(SFC, 10/21/14, p.D1)
4.5k BC A human skeleton of a man at least 50-years-old, dating to about this time, was excavated in southern Iraq around 1930 and taken to the Univ. of Pennsylvania’s Pen Museum, where it was lost in storage until 2014.
(SFC, 8/6/14, p.A5)
4.5k BC Neolithic burial mounds dating to this time were later discovered at Carnac, northwest France.
(Arch, 5/05, p.32)
4.5k BC Northern Oman has a ceramic tradition back to this time.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.52)
4.5k BC Horses were first domesticated in what is now the Ukraine. Hunters who ate them wild found that they could milk them tamed and ride them.
(SFC, 6/9/96, Zone 1 p.2)
4.5k BC - 4.2k BC The Skorba phase on Malta was marked by a growing population, with increased forest clearance for agriculture and grazing that may have led to erosion. Obsidian on Malta from the islands of Lipari and Panteleria indicate links to the outside world.
(AM, Jul/Aug '97 p.40)
4.5k BC-3.5k BC The Galgal Refaim, or the "wheel of ghosts," first noticed by scholars in 1968, was built during this period. It consists of four circles, the outermost more than 500 feet across, made up of an estimated 42,000 tons of basalt stone, the remains of massive walls that experts believe once rose as much as high as 30 feet. The enormous feat of construction was carried out by a society about which little is known. Scholars tended to agree that a tomb in the center of the site was added a millennia or two after the circles were erected in the Chalcolithic period. In 2011 a scholar suggested that Galgal Refaim was an excarnation facility.
(AP, 11/3/11)
4.5k BC - 2k BC A sacrificial dump in Guanghan, Sichuan Province, in China was uncovered in 1976. Large quantities of elephants tusks reveal that elephants roamed the area. Human figures, monster masks, and tree fragments made of bronze tubes were also found.
(WSJ, 9/27/96, p.A16)
4.431k BC Timbers of a possible ship of this time were found off Hayling Island near Portsmouth, England, in 1997. The structure might also have been a causeway.
(AM, Jul/Aug '97 p.13)
4.2k BC - 3.8k BC On Malta the Zebbug phase indicated evidence of collective burials.
(AM, Jul/Aug '97 p.40)
4.241k BC The Egyptian calendar was established.
(WSJ, 1/5/05, p.B1)
4.05k BC Agriculture arrived fully formed in Kent, England, about this time.
(Econ, 6/11/11, p.82)
4.004k BC Oct 23, According to 17th century divine James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, and Dr. John Lightfoot of Cambridge, the world was created on this day, a Sunday, at 9 a.m. "If you grew up with the King James edition of the Bible that I did, you learned that the world was created in 4004 BC."
(NG, Nov. 1985, edit. p.559)(HN, 10/23/98)
4k BC In 2011 it was reported that the earliest known winery, dating to about this time, had been discovered in Armenia.
(SFC, 1/11/11, p.A2)
4k BC People in China’s Yellow River Valley switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture about this time.
(SFC, 3/4/02, p.A3)
4k BC The Chinese began working with silkworms about this time. They built their first silk machine about 2,000 BC.
(Econ, 9/12/15, SR p.15)
c4k BC Apples (Malus Sieversii) similar to modern day varieties began to appear around Almaty, Kazakhstan. These ultimately produced the Red Delicious and Golden Delicious in America. The Red Delicious was hybridized into the Fuji and the Empire. The Golden Delicious was hybridized into the Gala, the Jonagold, the Mutsu, Pink Lady and Elstar.
(WSJ, 7/3/03, p.A1)
4k BC Artifacts dating to about this time, later held in Kosovo, were believed to belong to the Vinca, a prehistoric culture in southern Europe.
(AP, 2/22/13)
4k BC The Hittites settled around Cappadocia in present day Turkey.
(Smith., 5/95, p.25)
4k BC Skilled goldsmiths [proto-Thracians] lived in the area of Varna, now in Bulgaria, on the Black Sea.
(SFEC, 2/1/98, p.T3)(SFEC, 8/2/98, DB p.22)
4k BC Stone tablets show cheese as early as this time.
(HFA, '96, p.121)
4k BC Evidence of tuberculosis was found in a Neolithic burial ground near Heidelberg, where the skeleton of a young man showed fusion of the fourth and fifth dorsal vertebrae.
(WP, 1951, p.5)
4k BC Circumcision was part of religious rites in Egypt and Greece dating back to this time.
(SFC, 5/19/96, p.A-10)
c4k BC In Malta the Hypogeum, a complex of rock-cut chamber tombs, dated to this time. They were discovered in 1902.
(SFEC, 9/17/00, p.T3)
4k BC The Orkney Islands were inhabited at least since this time.
(SFEM, 10/10/99, p.23)
c4k BC In Poland the archeological site at Oslonki uncovered some 30 longhouses and 80 graves.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.73)
4k BC Chiefdoms of northern Europe were trading in amber.
(PacDis, Winter/'97, p.10)
4k BC The comet Hale-Bopp visited the inner solar system about this time. It next appeared in 1997.
(SFC, 3/28/97, p.A2)
c4k BC The Pistol Star, located between the Earth and center of the Milky Way, was first seen with infrared equipment in the early 1990s. It was measured to be 25,000 light-years away with a radius of 93-140 million miles. It was estimated to have formed 1-3 million years ago and shed much of its mass in violent eruptions estimated to have occurred about 6,000 years ago.
(USAT, 10/8/97, p.3A)
4k BC The oldest artifacts of the Mesopotamian city of Ur dated to about this time.
(ON, 8/20/11, p.9)
c4k BC The last wooly mammoths, Mammuthus primigenius, went extinct on Wrangel Island, north of the Arctic Circle.
(NH, 12/98, p.78)
4k BC - 3k BC The Indo-European language group divided into different branches.
(DrEE, 9/21/96, p.1)
4k BC - 2.5k BC A rock painting from this time in Tassili n'Ajjer, southeastern Algeria, illustrates a battle between 2 prehistoric groups armed with bows and arrows.
(NH, Jul, p.29)
4k BC - 1.5k BC Southern Britain was settled by emigrants from what is now the Netherlands and the French province of Brittany. They started farming, herding and burying their dead and are called the "beaker people" after a distinctive drinking vessel found in chambered mounds called "barrows." It is speculated that these people and their descendants began worshiping inside "henges," circular areas enclosed by big ditches and small banks of dirt. Four phases of development at Stonehenge in the Salisbury plain have been defined.
(HT, 3/97, p.20,22)
3.8k BC The Supe people, a maritime farming community, was established about this time along the coast of Peru.
(SFC, 1/20/09, p.A13)
3.8k BC - 3.7k BC In 2010 archeologists in Israel uncovered two fragments of a clay tablet with writing that resembled portions of the Code of Hammurabi of the 18th century BC. The fragments referred to issues of personal injury law relating to slaves and masters.
(SFC, 7/27/10, p.A2)
3.8k BC - 3.2k BC In Ireland at Poulnabrone Dolmen in County Clare, one of some 120 wedge tombs, bodies were interred over a 600 year period that ended about 3200BC.
(SFEC, 11/12/00, p.T8)
3.6k BC - 1k BC The Mesopotamian settlement of Nagar (in northeastern Syria) grew to become one of the first large cities of the Middle East. It began before 6,000BC and continued to about 1000BC.
(MT, summer 2003, p.11)
c3.761k BC The first year of the Jewish calendar that begins with Rosh Hashana. [1997 was year 5758]
(SFC, 10/1/97, p.A16)(WUD, 1994, p.767)
3.652k BC Archeologists found ears of popcorn 5,600 years old in the Bat Cave in New Mexico in 1948.
(HFA, '96, p.66)
3.627k BC - 3.377k BC In Armenia a leather shoe dating to this period was found in 2010 in a pit outside a cave.
(AP, 6/10/10)
3.6k BC In 2005 a team working for five years in the area of Kom El-Ahmar, Egypt, known in antiquity as Hierakonpolis, excavated a complex thought to belong to a ruler of the ancient city who reigned around this time. Archaeologists unearthed seven corpses believed to date to the era, as well as an intact figure of a cow's head carved from flint.
(AP, 4/22/05)
3.6k BC In Washington state the Osceola mudflow from Mount Ranier covered an area from Rainier to Puget Sound.
(SFEC, 7/12/98, p.A22)
3.6k BC The Supe people, a maritime farming community along the coast of Peru, disappeared about this time. In 2009 researchers found their disappearance coincided with earthquakes and landslides followed by massive flooding.
(SFC, 1/20/09, p.A13)
3.6k BC In 2012 South Korean archaeologist Cho Mi-soon said that the nation’s archeological agency has found the remains of a farming field from the Neolithic period on South Korea's east coast and that the site may date to about this time.
(AP, 6/27/12)
3.6k BC - 3.5k BC An Egyptian cemetery of working class inhabitants at Hierankopolis of this time showed evidence of mummification.
(AM, 9/01, p.13)
3.6k BC - 3k BC On Malta the Gantija phase saw the construction of the first megalithic temples.
(AM, Jul/Aug '97 p.43)
3.6k BC - 1.7k BC Neolithic jade pieces represent some of the oldest of Chinese art.
(WSJ, 2/19/98, p.A20)
3.5k BC Sumerians and Babylonians use a sexigesimal (base 60) number system according to historian Eric Temple Bell.
(V.D.-H.K.p.27)
3.5k BC King Etena of Babylonia was pictured on a coin, flying on an eagle’s back.
(NPub, 2002, p.2)
3.5k BC A linen shroud dating to this time was later put on display at the Egyptian museum in Turin, Italy.
(SSFC, 1/22/06, p.E6)
3.5k BC Farmers began to settle the lower slopes of the Tibetan plateau with millet as the dominant crop.
(Econ, 11/22/14, p.75)
3.5k BC - 3.1k BC In Egypt the "Knife of Gebel-el-Arak" was made with an ivory handle carved with hunting and battle scenes. It is now in the French Louvre.
(WSJ, 1/29/98, p.A16)
3.5k BC - 3k BC In 2008 a team of German and Peruvian archaeologists reported the discovery of a ceremonial plaza near Peru's north-central coast dating to this period.
(AP, 2/27/08)
3.5k BC - 2.4k BC The Tower of Babel was built during this period by people of one language who inhabited the land of Shinar in the kingdom of Nimrod.
(Econ, 4/26/08, p.108)
3.45k BC The first cities appeared along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates just north of what is now the Persian Gulf. The cities made up the Uruk culture named after the principal city of Uruk, which corresponds to the Biblical Erech. The culture invented writing, the lunar calendar, used metal and built monumental architecture. The cities remained independent for almost a thousand years.
(eawc, p.1)
3.4k BC According to Rakhine legend their first recorded kingdom arose, centered around the northern town of Dhanyawadi, in the 34th century BCE and lasted until 327 CE.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakhine_State)
3.309k BC Mar 10, A primordial Maya god, named GI by scholars, began his mythical reign.
(AM, Jul-Aug/99, p.16)
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1Mil BC Ascension Island, the top of a volcano, broke through the surface of the Atlantic Ocean about this time. Since then the island has grown to about 100 square km.
(Econ, 12/18/10, p.159)
1Mil BC DNA evidence in 2008 suggested that the black rat originated in South-East Asia about this time and then split into 6 lines, one of which colonized India and the Middle East and then spread to Europe.
(Econ, 3/15/08, p.97)
1Mil BC The Jaramillo event occurred and serves as a paleomagnetic marker. In 1982 William Glen authored “The Road to Jaramillo: Critical Years of the Revolution in Earth Science." The book's title comes from the Jaramillo magnetic event discovered in rocks from Jaramillo Creek in the Jemez Mountains in New Mexico.
(PacDis., Spg. 96, p.46)(www.asa3.org/ASA/book_reviews/12-92.htm)
1Mil BC A homo erectus skull from Daka, Ethiopia, from this time was identified in 2001 as an ancestor to all modern humans. Tim D. White and Berhani Asfaw led the team that discovered the fossils in 1997.
(SFC, 3/21/02, p.A1)
1Mil BC Homo erectus arrived in Java about this time. In 1891 Eugene Dubois, Dutch health officer, discovered the skull of a human in Java, Indonesia that he named Pithecanthropus erectus [Java Man]. The first Homo erectus skullcap was found near Trinil, Java.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.434)(RFH-MDHP, p.153)(SFC, 12/13/96, p.A4)(SFC, 11/14/00, p.A9)
1Mil BC A Grand Canyon lava dam created a lake larger than Lake Mead and Lake Powell combined. It extended from Toroweap Canyon back through Lake Powell to beyond Moab, Utah-- a distance of more than 400 miles.
(NH, 9/97, p.39)
1Mil BC The mean residence time for the water in Lake Vostok was one million years as compared to 6 years for Lake Ontario. Scientists in 1999 discovered living bacteria and theorized that the lake was warmed either by hot magma beneath the Earth's crust or by the downward pressure of ice.
(SFC, 12/11/99, p.A2)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok)
c1Mil BC The Haleakala volcano created the eastern half of Maui.
(SFEC, 8/27/00, p.T8)
c1Mil BC A star in the constellation Scorpius exploded in a super nova and evidence revealed in 1999 that a black hole was formed.
(SFC, 9/9/99, p.A10)
1Mil BC - 2000 BC In the last million or more years several continental glaciations have chilled much of the northern hemisphere and no small portion of the south.
(DD-EVTT, p.281)
950k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
900k BC In 2004 Scientists from the US, Britain and Kenya reported that a skull fragment of a small adult with some characteristics of Homo erectus was about 900,000 years old. It was found in 2003 in Olorgesalie, 100 miles southeast of the capital, Nairobi, Kenya.
(AP, 7/3/04)
900k BC In 2009 scientists reported finding advanced hand axes made about this time in southeastern Spain. Similar Acheulean type limestone tools, flaked on both edges, were at another site nearby dated to 760,000 BC.
(SFC, 9/5/09, p.A1)
890k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
840k BC - 420k BC A large migration of people from Africa to Asia and Europe took place over this period. A 2nd migration period occurred from 150k-80k.
(SFC, 3/7/02, p.A2)
800k BC Ancestors of the Neanderthals and Denisovans left Africa as far back as this time period and replaced or interbred with descendants of Homo erectus.
(SSFC, 9/16/12, p.C11)
800k BC Soleilhac, in the Massif Central of France, is the oldest unquestionable site of hominid occupation in Europe. It offers faunal remains and tools, but no hominid bones.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p.612)
800k BC In 1996 a team of fossil hunters reported 800,000 year-old hominids from the Gran Dolino site in the Atapuerca Mountains in northern Spain. The date was older by 300,000 years than any other human remains in Europe. They called the new species Homo antecessor. Among modern characteristics were a prominent brow line and multiple roots for premolar teeth, characteristics of early hominids.
(PacDis., Spg. 96, p.46)(SFC, 5/30/97, p.A8)
800k BC Some Indonesian and Dutch archeologist have presented evidence that early hominids in Asia made it to the island of Flores in the Javan archipelago.
(PacDis., Spg. 96, p.48)
800k BC The Haleakala shield volcano on Maui, Hawaii, appeared about this time.
(SFEM, 3/16/97, p.28)
800k BC - 450k BC In 2007 researchers dated DNA from Greenland mud under 1.2 miles of ice to about this time. The DNA indicated the presence of pine, yew and alder trees, as well as insects. Due to uncertainties in the dating, scientists could not rule out that the samples dated to the last interglacial, 130,000 to 116,000 years before the present.
(SFC, 7/6/07, p.A14)
780k BC Spanish scientists in 1997 announced a new human species from a 780,000 year old fossil.
(www.anomalous-images.com/news/news049.html)
781k BC Earth's magnetic field underwent a reversal about this time. The periods between polarity changes are called chrons.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_magnetic_field)(SSFC, 5/6/18, p.D12)
c760k BC Mono Lake in California has existed since at least this time.
(PacDis, Summer '97, p.38)
c760k BC The Long Valley Caldera, a 10 by 20 mile crater in central-eastern California, was created by a volcanic eruption in what later became the Bishop area. Mammoth Lakes was later set on the edge of the caldera, 215 miles northeast of LA. In 2003 it was reported that the Long Valley dome had been thrusting upward about an inch a year for the last 8 years.
(SFC,11/15/97, p.A4)(SFC,12/11/97, p.A8)(SFC, 12/20/99, p.A8)(SFC, 12/8/03, p.A4)
760k BC In 2009 scientists reported finding advanced hand axes made about this time in southeastern Spain. Similar Acheulean type limestone tools, flaked on both edges, were at another site nearby dated to 900,000 BC.
(SFC, 9/5/09, p.A1)
c750k BC California's Mono Lake was formed about this time as the Sierra Range lifted and the Great Basin sank.
(SSFC, 9/28/03, p.C12)
740k BC The Red Mountain cinder cone at Flagstaff, Arizona, dated to this time.
(SSFC, 7/23/06, p.G4)
730k BC A meteor crashed in Tasmania making Darwin glass from the friction of hitting.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.466)
730k BC Stegodons, extinct elephant-like animals, lived on the Indonesian island of Flores in association with stone flakes.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.20)
700k BC End of the Early Pleistocene.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)
700k BC A pyroclastic flow (hot gasses, pumice and other dry volcanic materials that roar down a volcano's slopes at one hundred km an hour) in California's Long Valley was so huge that it topped the Sierra Nevada.
(PacDisc. Spring/'96, p.31)
700k BC In 2005 scientists said that 32 black flint artifacts, found in river sediments in Pakefield in eastern England, date back 700,000 years and represent the earliest unequivocal evidence of human presence north of the Alps.
(AP, 12/14/05)
700k BC In 2016 scientists working in Indonesia reported fossil bones of Homo floriensis dating back to about this time. Remains found earlier dated back to 60k-100k years.
(SFC, 6/9/16, p.A9)
700k BC – 130k BC In 2010 experts from Greece and the US found rough axes and other tools, thought to be between 130,000 and 700,000 years, old close to shelters on the south coast of Crete.
(AP, 1/4/11)
670k BC - 400k BC Homo erectus occupied the Longushan cave. The Dragon Bone Hill site is 30 miles southwest of Beijing. The bones were found in the 1920s-1930s and were popularly referred to as Peking Man.
(Arch, 5/04, p.52)
690k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
640k BC Volcanic eruptions in northwest Wyoming, extending to Idaho and Montana, created a caldera some 40 miles long and 30 miles wide. The surface collapsed thousands of feet into a magma pool and marked the area later known as Yellowstone. Continuing eruptions caused climactic changes around the world.
(SFEC, 10/18/98, p.T5)(HC, 10/10/06)
600k BC The EETA 79001 meteorite was blasted from Mars about this time and contained evidence of "microbially produced methane." Its formation was dated to about 175 million years ago.
(SFC, 11/1/96, p.A16)
600k BC A skull of this age from Bodo, Ethiopia, exhibits the largest nasal width of any Homo fossil.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.32)
600k BC Dr. Leakey discovered oldest human skull to date, 600,000 years old, on Jul 17, 1959.
(MC, 7/17/02)
600k BC DNA evidence in 2012 indicated that the polar bears species dated back to about this time.
(Econ, 6/16/12, SR p.9)
600k BC - 500k BC The last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals lived about this time most likely in Africa.
(SFC, 7/11/97, p.A17)
600k BC - 300k BC Excavations begun in 1921 at Zhoukoudian, China, suggested evidence that Peking Man had mastered fire and practiced cannibalism over this period.
(NH, 3/1/04, p.46)
600k BC - 250k BC Homo heidelbergensis. Described in 1996 by Donald Johanson and Blake Edgar in: "From Lucy to Language: The Record of Human Evolution."
(SFC, 12/29/96, BR p.11)
c560k BC Tectonic uplifting caused the California Central Valley inland Corcoran Lake to rise and cut an exit to drain into the Bay Area. This carved Carquinez Strait and plugged the Salinas Valley outlet to Monterey Bay.
(SFC, 12/20/99, p.A8)
560k BC In 2015 French students found a human tooth from about this time in a cave at Tautavel in southwestern France, the oldest human body part ever discovered in the country.
(AP, 7/28/15)
512k BC - 510k BC Anthropologists in 2005 identified fossil chimp teeth and stone tools from this period that indicated humans and chimps inhabited a similar environment in Africa’s Great Rift Valley.
(SFC, 9/1/05, p.A2)
c500k BC The Medicine Lake Volcano created lava tubes that later became known as Lava Beds National Monument in northern California.
(SFC, 5/29/04, p.B4)
500k BC In Boxgrove England, a fossilized rhinoceros shoulder blade with a projectile wound was found recently and dated to this time.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.25)
c500k BC A human jawbone of about this age, homo Heidelbergensis, was found in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1907.
(SFEC, 9/26/99, p.T9)
500kBC Definitive evidence for cooking by Homo erectus dates back to about this time.
(Econ, 3/12/15, p.75)
500k BC - 250k BC Homo sapiens (archaic). Skull of adult male found by Greek villagers at Petralona, Greece in 1960.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 572)
500k BC - 200k BC In Ethiopia a hominid skull from this period was discovered in 2006 at the Gawis river drainage basin in the Afar region.
(Reuters, 3/24/06)
470k-410k In 2014 a UC Berkeley scientist dated Neanderthal bones found in Spain to between 410,000 and 470,000 years of age. Excavations had begun in 1984 in a cave in Spain’s Atapuerco mountains at a site called Sima de los Huesos (the Pit of the Bones).
(SFC, 6/20/14, p.D1)(www.atapuerca.org/huesosin.htm)
450k BC Scientists in 2017 reported that a giant waterfall tens of kilometers wide broke down a ridge which connected modern-day England to mainland Europe about this time, unleashing a mega-flood that gouged out the Channel and created the island of Britain.
(AFP, 4/4/17)
450k BC - 180k BC In 2007 scientists using sonar reported that at least 2 massive floods during this period cut Britain off from the European continent. Evidence of humans living in Britain began to show up only from about 60,000 BC.
(SFC, 7/19/07, p.A7)
c435k BC A major eruption by Mount Lassen in California left sediment called the Rockland Ash that could later be seen in the sea cliffs of Fort Funston on the SF coast.
(SFC, 12/20/99, p.A8)
c430k BC A prolonged warm period that lasted 28,000 years reached its peak about this time.
(SFC, 6/10/04, A15)
420k BC - 290k BC The youngest Homo erectus (from China) date in this period.
(NH, 4/97, p.70)
400k BC Activity at Mount Tehama volcano, Part of the Lassen volcanic center in the Sacramento Valley of California, declined about this time. Volcanic ash from its eruptions could later be seen in a band of white material on the cliff of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach at Fort Funston.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tehama)(SSFC, 6/21/15, p.A2)
400k BC In 2010 a Tel Aviv University team excavating a cave in central Israel said teeth found in the cave are about 400,000 years old and resemble those of other remains of modern man, known scientifically as Homo sapiens, found in Israel. The earliest Homo sapiens remains found until now are half as old. The prehistoric Qesem cave was discovered in 2000, and excavations began in 2004.
(AP, 12/28/10)
400k BC Irish Elk (Megaloceros giganteus) lived in temperate climates throughout Europe and western Asia from about this time to a last record in Ireland at 10,600 years ago.
(NH, 8/96, p.17)
400k BC Human and wolf bones have been found in the same place from about this time.
(SFC, 6/13/97, p.A10)
400k BC In 1998 researchers at Duke Univ., studying hypoglossal canals in fossil skulls, suggested that Neanderthals could well have developed speech at this time. The research was disputed in 1999.
(SFC, 2/16/99, p.A2)
400k BC Researchers in 2000 found evidence from a homo erectus skull, Sm 3, of this period that individuals communicated with each other.
(SFC, 11/14/00, p.A9)
400k BC Scientists in 2013 reported mitochondrial DNA results from a Human thighbone found in Spain estimated to be 400,000 years old. The DNA showed a closer relation to Denisovans who lived in Siberia than to Neanderthals.
(SFC, 12/5/13, p.A9)
400k BC - 380k BC Researchers in Germany in 1997 unearthed wooden spears made of spruce of this age from an ancient lakeshore hunting ground. The spears were found in a coal mine in Shöningen, near Hanover.
(SFC, 2/27/97, p.A6)(AM, May/Jun 97 p.25)
400k BC - 300k BC Articulate speech becomes possible according to Dr. Laitman, anatomist at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. His studies show that the degree to which the base of the skull is flexed, or bent, is indicative of whether the larynx can move up or down. Early Homo skulls are only slightly flexed at the base, so that full command of articulate speech was a later development.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 600)
400k BC - 48k BC A human group, later called the Denisovans, lived in Asia during this period. They then interbred with humans expanding from Africa along the coast of South Asia. In 2010 fossil evidence from a Siberian cave in 2008 revealed that their DNA was related to the DNA of people from New Guinea, which contained 4.8% Denisovan DNA. 3-5% of the DNA from native people of Papua New Guinea, Australia, the Philippines and other nearby islands came from Denisovans, who left Africa as far back as 800,000 BC. In 2014 scientists reported that a genetic between extinct Denisovans and some modern-day Tibetans and Sherpas.
(SFC, 12/23/10, p.A4)(SSFC, 9/16/12, p.C11)(SFC, 7/3/14, p.D1)
385k BC - 172k BC In 2018 it was reported that stone tools, found in India, were fashioned during this period by Neanderthals, Homo sapiens or an evolutionary cousin.
(SFC, 2/1/18, p.A4)
380k BC The skull of an archaic member of the genus Homo was later found in Zambia. It exhibited a hypoglossal canal similar to modern humans, which indicated at least the potential for speech.
(SFC, 4/28/98, p.A5)
370k BC - 260k BC The site of Diring Yuriakh in central Siberia has stone flakes and simple tools known as unifacial choppers that date by thermoluminescence to this period.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.21)
c350k BC Humans left tracks in the volcanic ash of the Roccamonfina volcano in Italy.
(SFC, 3/13/03, p.2)
300k BC Erectus seems to give way to his successor, Homo sapiens.
(NG, Nov. 1985, K.F. Weaver, p.600)
300k BC Scientists in 2017 reported that five individuals from a site called Jebel Irhoud in Morocco looked like modern humans and dated to about this time. This made them the oldest Homo sapiens found to date. Up to now the earliest Homo sapiens fossils found in Ethiopia dated back 195,000 years.
(SFC, 6/8/17, p.A14)(Econ 6/10/17, p.77)
300k BC - 250k BC In 1981 Russian Archeologist Yuri Mochanov of the Yakutish Academy of Sciences announced the discovery of human habitation in northern Siberia that dated back to at least 30,000 years. More precise techniques later measured the stone artifacts at the site to 250k-300k BC.
(SFC, 2/28/97, p.A15)
300k BC - 200k BC Swanscombe skull. Fragments of sapiens skull representing Britain's oldest known human remains.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 612)
300k BC - 200k BC In the Sierra de Atapuerca fossil remains of 32 people from this time were found at Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones) in northern Spain. They represented an early stage in the development of Neanderthals. Grooves were observed in the roots immediately under the crowns of rear teeth, probably from the use of toothpicks.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.31)
300k BC - 30kBC The Neanderthal man of the type first found in 1856 lived over this period. Dental evidence in 2004 indicated that they reached adulthood by about age 15.
(SFC, 7/11/97, p.A17)(WSJ, 4/29/04, p.A1)
300k BC - 12k During the periodic ice ages the Loess Hills formed along the eastern side of the Missouri River when westerly winds blew the silty sediments of the melted glaciers along the low walls of the river valley.
(NH, 11/96, p.76)
c299k BC In 1921 the Broken Hill skull, also called the Kabwe skull in recognition of a nearby town, was discovered by a Swiss miner working in the Broken Hill lead and zinc mine in Northern Rhodesia (later Zambia). In 2020 sophisticated dating methods determined the skull to be about 299,000 years old, plus or minus 25,000 years. Scientists initially assigned the skull to a species they called Homo rhodesiensis. Most scientists in 2020 assign it to the species Homo heidelbergensis, which inhabited parts of Africa and Europe starting about 600,000 years ago.
(AP, 4/1/20)
c280k BC A mastodon tooth and camel jaw of about this time were found in 1997 in tunnels under Los Angeles in 1997.
(SFC, 2/12/97, p.A11)
c250k BC About this time the human brain size stopped its slow trend toward enlargement. It may correspond with the human attainment of the rudiments of language.
(NH, 9/97, p.6)
c250k BC The ice dome at Summit, the center of the Greenland ice cap, was about this age at its bedrock.
(SFC, 10/9/97, p.C18)
c250k BC In Siberia stone tools along a river near Irkutsk were dated by radioisotope to about this time.
(SFC, 2/17/98, p.A2)
240kBC-9kBC This is called the Rancholabrean age and is named after the La Brea tar pits near Los Angeles.
(SFC, 8/3/13, p.C3)
250k BC - 100k BC The period of the Lower Paleolithic.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)
233k BC An eruption spewed volcanic fallout over a wide swathe of Ethiopia about this time. In 2022 it was reported that Homo sapiens fossils found in Ethiopia in 1967 are older than previously believed. Researchers said they used the geochemical fingerprints of a thick layer of ash found above the sediments containing the fossils to ascertain that it resulted from an eruption that spewed volcanic fallout over a wide swathe of Ethiopia about this time. The new findings conform with the most recent scientific models of human evolution placing the emergence of Homo sapiens sometime between 350,000 to 200,000 years ago.
(Reuters, 1/12/22)
c200k BC In 1911 a broken wooden spear shaped earlier than this age was found at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, UK.
(SFC, 6/28/97, p.E3)
200k BC A recent theory suggests that we're all descended from one African "Eve" who lived some 200,000 years ago. The theory is based on DNA studies from the placentas of 147 women of different racial backgrounds.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.434,460)
200k BC Within the past 200,000 years our own species, Homo sapiens, dispersed out of Africa.
(PacDis., Spg. 96, p.46)
200k BC It is speculated that the Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens split from a common ancestor about this time. DNA research in 2008 indicated that shortly after this time Homo Sapiens split into 2 groups. Most people in 2008 represented one group, while the bushmen of southern Africa represented the other.
(SFC, 10/1/96, p.A2)(Econ, 4/26/08, p.101)
200k BC About this time a major earthquake in Hawaii caused a large tsunami that crossed the Pacific in 4 hours and up the shoreline of Japan for 300 yards.
(SFC, 2/17/97, p.A4)
200k BC Human speech began no earlier than about this time.
(SFC, 1/10/00, p.A6)
200k BC In 2010 Israeli archeologists found shards of flint found scattered around a fire pit in a cave near Tel Aviv dating to this time. They said the shards might be the world's oldest known disposable knives.
(AP, 8/30/10)
200k BC - 30k BC The Neanderthals lived in Europe and southwest Asia. In 1996 it was discovered that skulls of Neanderthals showed oblong, vertical swellings in the bone along the sides of the nasal hole. Researchers also claimed that their noses were unusually large.
(WH, 1994, p.21)(SFC, 10/1/96, p.A2)
195k BC Human fossils found in Ethiopia in 1967 were dated in 2005 to be about 195k years old.
(SFC, 2/17/05, p.A6)
186k BC Human footprints that dated back to this time were discovered along Langebaan Lagoon some 60 miles north of Cape Town, South Africa, in Sep, 1995. The 117,000 year-old prints were cut out and moved to the South African Museum in 1998.
(SFC, 8/15/97, p.A1,17)(SFC, 2/27/98, p.D3)(SFC, 6/24/98, p.A12)
186k BC An ice age began about this time.
(SFC, 8/15/97, p.A17)
180k BC On Malta the Ghar Dalam cave near the harbor of Marsaxlokk revealed bones dating to about this time of an extinct pygmy hippo and elephant.
(AM, Jul/Aug '97 p.42)
176.5k BC In France Neanderthals created two stone rings in a cave in Bruniquel. The oval structures, measuring 172 and 25 square feet, and were discovered in 1990 and dated to about this time in 2016.
(SFC, 5/26/16, p.A4)
c170k BC In 2000 the Mitochondrial Eve, the single female ancestor of all humans, was dated to this time.
(NH, 3/1/04, p.32)
170k BC A supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud occurred and was not detected until its light reached earth in 1987CE. It was a catastrophic implosion of matter in less than a second to a dense object about 15 miles across, a neutron star.
(NG, 5/88, p.629,635)
165k BC In 2009 scientific analysis of stone age tools from South Africa suggested that humans about this time began using fire to make it easier to flake stone tools and to make them sharper. The process was believed to have become widespread by about 70000BC.
(SFC, 8/26/09, p.A3)
164k BC In 2007 scientists reported that shellfish evidence from the a cave at Pinnacle Point near Mossel Bay, South Africa, indicated human habitation at this time and that red ochre at the site indicated a cognitive world enriched by symbols.
(SFC, 10/18/07, p.A8)
160k BC Scientists in 2019 reported that a fossilized chunk of jawbone found by a monk in a Chinese cave nearly 40 years earlier has been revealed as coming from the Denisovans, a mysterious relative of the Neanderthals. The right half of a jawbone with teeth is at least 160,000 years old.
(AP, 5/2/19)
160k BC An ice-core drilled by Russian scientists at Vostok Station in East Antarctica was analyzed by a group of scientists in Grenoble, Switzerland and is bound to go back to an ice-age of this period.
(NOHY, Weiner, 3/90, p.67)(See Nature 329, 10/87)
160k BC - 154k BC Fossils of human skulls, found in 1997 near Herto, Ethiopia, were dated in 2003 to this period. Tim D. White and colleagues made the find.
(SFC, 6/12/03, p.A10)
150k BC The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, Ca., are no older than 150k years.
(SFC, 4/8/05, p.A17)
c150k BC In 1980 evidence of Aboriginal habitation in Australia were discovered in charcoal remains deep in the bed of the Great Barrier Reef and dated to this time.
(SFEC, 2/28/99, p.T4)
c150k BC Humans moved out beyond Africa about this time.
(WSJ, 7/13/01, p.W16)
150k BC - 80k BC A large migration of people from Africa to Asia and Europe took place over this period. An earlier migration period occurred from 840k-420k.
(SFC, 3/7/02, p.A2)
140k BC -120k BC In 2021 scientists reported that bones found in an Israeli quarry are from a branch of the human evolutionary tree and are 120,000 to 140,000 years old. The fragments of a skull, lower jaw bone and tooth were uncovered in Nesher Ramla in 2010. Researchers determined that the fossils likely came from a hominin group closely related to Neanderthals and sharing many of their features, such as the shape of the lower jaw.
(AP, 6/24/21)
140k BC - 70k BC DNA evidence indicated that a hunter-gatherer group diverged from an original common ancestor in Africa about this time and migration out of Africa followed.
(SFC, 6/9/03, p.A4)
135kBC DNA evidence in 1997 indicated that the modern dog has been around since about this time.
(SFC, 6/13/97, p.A10)(MT, Fall 02, p.14)
135k BC - 90k BC Severe droughts impacted Eastern Africa over this period.
(WSJ, 4/25/08, p.A2)
130.7k BC Researchers in 2017 said humanlike behavior dating to about this time was shown in the smashed bones of elephant-like mastodon unearthed by during a routine dig in the winter of 1992-93 during a freeway expansion project in San Diego, Ca. Researchers speculated that the bone smashers could have been Neanderthals, Denisovans or Homo erectus.
(SFC, 4/27/17, p.A7)(Econ, 4/29/17, p.64)
130k BC The "first true Homo sapiens" about this time were from Ethiopia and described in 1996 by Donald Johanson and Blake Edgar in: "From Lucy to Language: The Record of Human Evolution" (1996).
(SFC, 12/29/96, BR p.11)
130k BC The lineage that includes the domestic cat and its wild relatives originated about this time. Genetic analysis in 2007 suggested that the transformation of a vicious predator into a docile tabby took place about 10,000 years ago.
(www.livescience.com/animals/070628_cat_family.html)
130k BC - 30k BC The Middle Stone Age.
(SFC, 4/28/95, p.A-1)
126k BC-11.7k BC The Late Pleistocene is a geochronological age of the Pleistocene Epoch and is associated with Upper Pleistocene or Tarantian stage Pleistocence series rocks. The beginning of the stage is defined by the base of the Eemian interglacial phase before the final glacial episode of the Pleistocene 126,000 ~+mn~ 5,000 years ago. The end of the age is defined as 11,700 years BC. The age represents the end of the Pleistocene epoch and is followed by the Holocene epoch.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Pleistocene)
125k BC Neandertal Homo sapiens indicates that brain size and organization were basically modern. The Neanderthals were the first people known to bury their dead. The Neanderthals spread all across Europe, the Middle East, and western and central Asia.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 612, 614, 616)
125k BC Scientists in 2000 identified human stone tools of this time from a fossil reef along the Red Sea coast of Eritrea. They identified the area as the "world's first oyster bar."
(SFC, 5/5/00, p.A2)
125k BC A long period of global warming began that lasted to about 11.5k BC. Polar meltwater raised the sea level by 4-6 meters.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Ice_Age_Temperature.png)(Econ, 6/16/12, SR p.7)
125k-80k The Daly City Dunes on the western end of San Bruno Mountain formed during this period, when the North Peninsula of the San Francisco Bay Area was an island and water lapped at the base of the mountain.
(www.mountainwatch.org/kens-words/2012/1/19/save-the-daly-city-dunes.html)
120k BC End of the Middle Pleistocene. Middle Pleistocene began 700,000 years ago.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)
120k BC A Chinese fossil skullcap, named Maba, is stored in Beijing at the Inst. of Vertebrate Paleontology.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.464)
120k BC In 2014 a bulldozer enlarging a reservoir near Snowmass, Colorado, uncovered a trove of fossil bones dating to about this time.
(SFC, 11/27/14, p.A6)
120k BC The Earth’s ice age that began around 186,000BC receded about this time.
(SFC, 8/15/97, p.A17)
120k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
120k BC - 80k BC Oct 14, Researchers in 2015 reported that 47 fossilized human teeth found in China’s Hunan province dated back to this period. Earlier fossils from southern Asia were only about 45,000 years old.
(SFC, 10/15/15, p.A5)
120k BC - 80k BC Bone fragments from this period of Neanderthals from the Moula-Guercy cave site in France were reported in 1999 to show evidence of cannibalism.
(SFC, 10/1/99, p.A3)
120k BC - 60k BC The Klasies River Mouth fossils, found in caves in a bluff overlooking the Indian Ocean on the southern tip of (Africa) the continent. Although fragmented, the fossils indicated early modern man.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 460)
120k BC - 10k BC In Thailand the site at Chiang Saen indicates long term occupation that dates back to the late Pleistocene.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.G)
118k BC In 2021 Scientists said artifacts unearthed in a cave in Morocco dating back as far as 120,000 years ago indicate that humans were making specialized bone tools, skinning animals and then using tools to process these skins for fur and leather.
(Reuters, 9/16/21)
114k BC Controversial data from the Jinmium rock-shelter in northern Australia suggests humans may have reached the continent at this time.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.21)
110k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
110k BC A Homo sapiens skull of this time was later found near the Kebara site in Israel. It had a hypoglossal canal the size of modern humans, which was thought to be indicative of speech.
(SFC, 4/28/98, p.A5)
100k BC The last high stand of the sea at the middle coast of California was about this time. (GH-CEH, p.20)
100k BC In 2008 DNA evidence indicated that much of the human population had descended from a small band of migrants that left Africa for the Middle East about this time.
(SFC, 2/22/08, p.A4)
100k BC Neanderthal man began to bury his dead.
(NG, Nov. 1985, R. Leakey & A. Walker, p.629)
100k BC Spear-like tools are found in eastern Zaire near Lake Rutanzige. Three sites along the Semlike River in the Katanda region of Africa's Great Rift Valley show tools made from the rib bones of large mammals. The tools have rows of barbs cut along one edge of the bone. New testing techniques for age determination were used; i.e. thermoluminescence, electron spin resonance, and uranium series dating. The three ranges were: 180,000BC-75,000; 160,000BC-89,000; and 173,000BC-139,000. [see 88k]
(SFC, 4/28/95, p.A-1)
100k BC Small stone tools found in Gaojia near Fengdu on the banks of the Yangtze indicate a tool workshop. More than a 1,000 tools have been found and were probably used to collect roots.
(NH, 7/96, p.32)
c100k BC In 1943 construction workers in Millbrae, Ca., uncovered elephant bones that dated to about this time.
(Ind, 9/21/02, 5A)
100k BC About this time another major earthquake in Hawaii caused a large tsunami that crossed the Pacific in 4 hours and up the shoreline of Japan for 300 yards. [see 200,000BC]
(SFC, 2/17/97, p.A4)
100k BC The Caribbean rodent Amblyrhiza, a 300-pound rat, died out about this time.
(NH, 4/97, p.84)
100,000 In 2008 scientists unearthed human-made paint “toolkits" from the Blombos Cave in South Africa dating to about this time.
(SFC, 10/14/11, p.A5)
100k BC Hunters stalked giant camels in the Syrian desert about this time. Bones of the “Syrian Camel," as tall as some modern-day elephants, were discovered 150 miles north of Damascus in 2005.
(AP, 10/11/06)
100k BC - 80k BC In 2007 a human skull from this time, consisting of 16 pieces, was dug up after two years of excavation at a site in Xuchang in China’s Henan province.
(AFP, 1/23/08)
100k BC - 80k BC In 2010 Polish scientists announced the discovery of 3 Neanderthal teeth, dating back to about this time, in the Stajnia Cave, north of the Carpathian Mountains.
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100201/ap_on_re_eu/eu_poland_neanderthal_teeth)
100k BC - 50k BC The 200-pound Genyornis newtoni, an ostrich-like bird, and the 25-foot Megalonia lizard were among the megafauna that flourished in Australia during this period.
(SFC, 1/8/99, p.A2)
100k BC - 35k BC This is the approximate Mousterian cultural period.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)
100k BC - 35k BC This is the Middle Paleolithic.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)
95k BC In 2003 a 3-foot-tall adult female skeleton was found in a cave believed to be 18,000 years old on the equatorial island of Flores, located east of Java and northwest of Australia. Scientists named the extinct species Homo floresiensis. Scientists in 2005 said the group emerged some 95,000 years earlier and went extinct about 12,000 years ago.
(AP, 10/27/04)(SFC, 10/28/04, p.A1)(SFC, 3/4/05, p.A2)
90k BC An Israeli-French team working in Israel use the technique of thermoluminescence to show early modern humans from Qafzeh cave. A Neandertal from Kebara cave showed an age of 60,000 years. The study was meant to find out the relationship between the two groups.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 460)
90k BC Humans migrated into the Levant if not Europe proper by this time.
(NH, 7/96, p.72)
90k BC Potassium-argon dating and thermoluminescence can be used to date pieces of pottery back to about this time.
(SFEC, 12/15/96, BR p.7)
88k BC The Katanda site in Zaire (Congo) was dated to this time. Evidence in the 1990s showed bone points showed barbs on 3 edges and rings carved in the base to tie them to shafts.
(SFC, 1/11/02, p.A2)
80k BC In 1983 an international expedition of American, Polish and Egyptian anthropologists in the Aswan region unexpectedly came upon the skeleton of a prehistoric man thought to be about 80,000 years old, the oldest human skeleton ever found in Egypt. Early modern humans were present in the Levant between 130,000-80,000 BP.
(http://tinyurl.com/2l2rmz)(www.athenapub.com/8shea1.htm)
80k BC - 70k BC The human population declined suddenly according to evidence from the mutation rate of mitochondria evaluated in 2000. The survivors provided the gene pool for all humans thereafter.
(DC, 7/1/00)
77k BC In 2011 scientists in South Africa said layers of cave floor at a natural rock shelter called Sibudu dated to this time with evidence of plant-based bedding used by humans.
(Econ, 12/10/11, p.90)
75k BC In 2002 evidence from the Blombos Cave in South Africa indicated possible symbolic thinking. Sophisticated tools of stone and carve bone had etchings that indicated complex behavior. Evidence of ornamental bead-making was reported in 2004.
(SFC, 1/11/02, p.A2)(SFC, 4/16/04, p.A2)
75k BC Human head lice and body lice diverged about this time, which means that human clothing began about this time.
(Econ, 12/24/05, Survey p.7)
74k BC The major Toba volcanic eruption occurred in Sumatra about this time. It was later believed that this eruption caused a major temperature drop and reduction in the human population. An ice age soon followed. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA seemed to corroborate a significant reduction in human population around this time.
(DC, 9/2/02)(Econ, 12/24/05, Survey p.9)
70k BC Two Neanderthal skulls from France of this time were later found. They had a hypoglossal canal the size of modern humans, which was thought to be indicative of speech.
(SFC, 4/28/98, p.A5)
70k BC Genetic studies in 2008 estimated that the human population at this time may have shrunk to as low as 2000 in Eastern Africa due to a long period of severe droughts there.
(WSJ, 4/25/08, p.A2)
70k BC A handful of Africans left the continent of their birth about this time.
(Econ, 4/29/17, p.64)
69k BC Scientists reported in 2012 that shard evidence known as microliths from South Africa indicated that people from this time were capable of making arrow heads by heating a suitable lump of rock in a fire and then bashing it to flake pieces from the surface.
(Econ, 11/10/12, p.84)
66k BC Scientists in 2010 said Mammoth Mountain in the central California Sierras was formed about this time as a result of volcanic eruptions that took place over less than 2,000 years.
(SFC, 3/8/10, p.C1)
c65k BC Geneticists in 2005 used DNA evidence to conclude that human emigration from Africa took place about this time from the southern end of the Red Sea and then pushing along the coast of India and Southeast Asia. The Orang Asli people of Malaysia likely descended from this 1st migration.
(SFC, 5/13/05, p.A7)(Econ, 12/24/05, Survey p.5)
65k BC In 2007 a metatarsal from the Callao Man was discovered in the Philippines and dated in 2010 by uranium-series dating to about this time.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabon_Man)
65k BC In 2021 it was reported that red ochre pigment discovered on stalagmites in the Caves of Ardales, near Malaga in southern Spain, were created by Neanderthals about this time, making them possibly the first artists on earth.
(Reuters, 8/8/21)
60k BC A Neandertal from Kebara cave (Israel) showed an age of 60,000 years. An Israeli-French team working in Israel use the technique of thermoluminescence to study the relationship between early humans and Neanderthals.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 460)
60k BC At Shanidar, a large cave in the Zagros mountains of northeastern Iraq soil samples from a grave of a [Neanderthal] man of this time indicated pollen grains from 8 different types of flowers. [2nd ref dated at c.10,000BC]
(WH, 1994, p.21)(SFEM, 6/7/98, p.52)
60k BC - 10k BC The Acheulian Age or early Stone Age culture lasted over this period.
(Enc. of Africa, 1976, p.165)
57k BC Scientists in 2000 estimated that a Y-chromosome African male, nicknamed Adam, dated to about this time. Genetic analysis traced all modern human males back to this ancestor.
(NH, 3/1/04, p.34)(NG, 8/04, p.42)
53k BC In 2008 a human cranium dating to about this time was found in the Manot Cave in Israel. Anthropologists later said the cranium was a missing connection between African and European populations.
(SFC, 1/29/15, p.A7)
53k BC - 50k BC During this period the first humans migrated to Australia from the islands of Indonesia. It is believed that they came in bamboo rafts from Indonesia and also from southern China.
(SFC, 1/8/99, p.A2)(NG, Oct. 1988, p.467)
53k BC - 45k BC Australia's early human population wiped out the continent's megafauna over this period.
(SFC, 6/8/01, p.A8)
53k BC - 27k BC Prehuman fossils from a site on the Solo River near the Javanese town of Ngandong were dated in 1996 to this period, and identified as belonging to the species of Homo erectus. Brain size was equivalent to modern humans.
(SFC, 12/13/96, p.A4)(NH, 4/97, p.70)(NH, 9/97, p.6)
52k BC Scientists in 2022 reported that modern humans lived about this time at the Mandrin Grotto in southern France.
(https://tinyurl.com/2p847cby)(AP, 2/9/22)
51k BC The fossil of a Diprotodon, a giant marsupial from this time, was excavated in 2001 from Cox's Creek in New South Wales.
(SFC, 6/8/01, p.A8)
51k BC - 44k BC Scientists in 2022 reported that an asteroid struck a mountain ridge during this period in China's Heilongjiang Province leaving a crater about 1.85 km wide. It was named Yilan, after a nearby city.
(https://tinyurl.com/2p8jjn9c)
50k BC Homo sapiens sapiens, man the doubly wise, appeared about this time. In 2000 DNA evidence indicated that modern man evolved out of Africa as recently as this time.
(NOHY, Weiner, 3/90, p.5)(SFC, 12/7/00, p.A3)
50k BC Research on hair DNA in 2011 indicated that the first humans arrived in Australia about this time.
(SFC, 9/23/11, p.A10)
50k BC In 2017 scientists in Mexico discovered microbial life trapped in crystals in caves in Naica that dated to about this time.
(SSFC, 2/19/17, p.A2)
50k BC The stone age culture of Papua New Guinea goes back this time.
(SFC, 5/29/96, p.A8)
50k BC Arizona’s Barringer Crater was created about this time by a meteor. Named after mining engineer Daniel Barringer, it measures 3/4 of a mile wide and 640 feet deep and is suspected to have resulted from a meteor of about 100 feet in diameter. An iron meteor 100 feet in diameter and weighing about 60,000 tons crashed into the desert at about 45,000 miles per hour near Winslow, Az. A crater 4,000 feet wide and 570 feet deep was created. 85% of it melted and the rest broke into bits called Canyon Diablo meteorites.
(SFC, 7/2/99, p.A7)(www.barringercrater.com/science/)
50k BC - 40k BC Homo sapiens (Neandertal). Skull of adult male found by D. Peyrony and L. Capitan at La Ferrassie, France in 1909. Neandertal is the German site of discovery in 1856.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 573)
50k BC - 40k BC A Homo neanderthalensis skull was found at the Amud cave in Israel in 1961.
(NH, 4/97, p.22)
50k BC-20k BC Archaeologists have identified evidence of stone age technology in Aq Kupruk, and Hazar Sum. Plant remains at the foothill of the Hindu Kush mountains indicate, that North Afghanistan was one of the earliest places to domestic plants and animals.
(https://www.afghan-web.com/history/chronology/)rasi
50k BC-20k BC Researches in 2012 reported that DNA evidence has indicated the presence of foreign DNA indicating interbreeding during this period between humans and an unknown sister species called “a Neanderthal sibling species in Africa." Humans apparently shared the planet with this cousin species for over150,000 years.
(SFC, 7/27/12, p.A12)
48k BC In 2004 archeologists claimed to have found evidence of human habitation at a site along the Savannah River in Allendale County, SC.
(SFC, 11/18/04, p.A7)
c48k BC An iron meteor 100 feet in diameter and weighing about 60,000 tons crashed into the desert at about 45,000 miles per hour near Winslow, Az. near the current Lowell Observatory. Meteor Crater measured 4,000 feet wide and 570 feet deep. 85% of it melted and the rest broke into bits called Canyon Diablo meteorites. This was the first crater to be identified as being caused by a meteor.
(SFC, 7/2/99, p.A7)
c48k BC Charcoal from camp fires in the Pedra Faruda site of Piaui state, Brazil, were carbon dated in 1987 to this time.
(SFEC, 2/20/00, p.A18)
48k BC - 44k BC In Australia about 85% of the land-dwelling megafauna weighing over 100 pounds went extinct about this time. It was later suspected that systematic burning of the forests by humans contributed to the extinction. Some 55 species died off including the 230-pound flightless "thunder bird" called Genyornis.
(SFC, 1/8/99, p.A2)(SFC, 6/8/01, p.A8)
48k BC - 30k BC In 2010 scientists reported that genetic material, pulled from a pinky finger bone found in a Siberian cave dating to this period, showed a new and unknown type of pre-human living about this time alongside modern humans and Neanderthals.
(Reuters, 3/24/10)(SFC, 3/25/10, p.A4)(Econ, 3/27/10, p.87)
48k BC -18k BC In 2011 the journal Current Biology reported that all polar bears today have descended from one female brown bear in Ireland between 20,000 and 50,000 years ago.
(SFC, 7/8/11, p.A6)
45k BC The extinction of most of Australia’s large animals occurred about this time, shortly after the arrival of humans.
(SFC, 7/8/05, p.A2)
45k BC - 42k BC Archeologists in 2007 reported on human teeth, tools, beads, carved ivory and other artifacts dug up at the Kostenki archeological site on the Don River in Russia, about 250 miles south of Moscow. They dated these artifacts to 45,000 to 42,000 years ago, an age similar to other items found in Western Europe.
(Reuters, 1/11/07)
43k BC In 2016 Russian scientists reported that mammoth bones from about this time, found near the Kara Sea in Siberia, indicated that they were hunted by humans.
(SFC, 1/15/16, p.A6)
43k BC A flute-like instrument made of bear bone was found by archeologist Janez Dirjec at the Divje Babe site in the valley of the Idrijca River in Slovenia. It was believed to be about 45,000 years old.
(SFC, 10/31/96, p.A12)
c43k BC About this time some 7 women led to the descendants of the population of modern Europe. In 2001 geneticist Bryan Sykes authored "The Seven Daughters of Eve."
(WSJ, 7/13/01, p.W16)
43k BC Scientists in 2008 reported that one of two genetically distinct mammoth groups went extinct about this time.
(www.science.psu.edu/alert/Schuster6-2008.htm)
43k BC-41k BC Home sapiens populations were living in Italy by this time.
(SFC, 6/15/12, p.A11)
42k BC Poison-tipped arrows and ostrich egg beads were made by hunter-gatherers in South Africa. In 2012 the artifacts were said to be characteristic of the San hunter-gatherers.
(SFC, 7/31/12, p.A2)
42.2k BC-39.5k BC Home sapiens populations were living in England by this time.
(SFC, 6/15/12, p.A11)
41k BC Scholars surmised that diggers in Africa's Swaziland began to seek iron about this time.
(SFEC, 5/11/97, Z1 p.7)
41k BC In 2006 archeologists reported evidence of cannibalism about this time from Neanderthal bones at the El Sidron cave in the Asturias region of Spain.
(SFC, 12/11/06, p.A1)
41k BC A land bridge between Australia and Tasmania formed about this time allowing people to cross into Tasmania. Two thousand years later the megafauna of Tasmania were gone.
(Econ, 9/14/13, SR p.5)
41k BC The skull of a giant kangaroo dating to this time was found in a cave in the thick rainforest of the rugged northwest of Tasmania in 2000. Scientists used the skull to argue that that man likely hunted to death the giant kangaroo and other very large animals on the southern island of Tasmania.
(AP, 8/12/08)
40.7k BC In 1992 rock engravings in South Australia are carbon dated at 42,700 years.
(SF E&C, 1/15/1995, T-4)
40k BC This date approximately marks the Aurignacian cultural period represented by characteristic stone and bone tool kits.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)(AM, 7/00, p.30)
40k BC The oldest Asian Homo sapiens are about this age.
(NH, 4/97, p.70)
40k BC Home sapiens in Germany were making flutes about this time.
(SFC, 6/15/12, p.A11)
40k BC The earliest evidence for personal ornaments appeared in anatomically modern humans about this time.
(AM, 7/00, p.30)
40k BC The bones of a Neanderthal baby from this time were found in southwestern France in 1914. The "Le Moustier 2" bones were put away and re-discovered in 1996.
(SFC, 9/5/02, p.A16)
40k BC In later Washington state Mount St. Helens was born and intermittent eruptions continued to about 500BC.
(SFEC, 8/16/98, p.A15)
c40k BC Volcanic activity began forming the craters and mountains around Mono Lake, Ca.
(PacDis, Summer '97, p.2)
40k BC - 20k BC DNA evidence indicated that 4 distinct population lineages entered the New World across the Bering Sea during this period.
(SFC, 2/17/98, p.A2)
40k BC - 12k BC A great river of ice formed in Oregon’s Wallowa Valley. The moraines around Wallowa Lake remained after the glacier melted.
(SSFC, 7/9/06, p.G4)
40k BC - 2000 Sea level seems to have dropped at least four times in this period.
(DD-EVTT, p.300)
39k BC In 2005 scientists suggested that a supernova took place about this time at a distance of 250 light years from Earth. A shock wave of iron rich grains hit Earth 7,000 years later. Slower debris accumulated into comet-like objects. They suggested that one may have hit North America about 11,000BC and caused the extinction of mammoths.
(SFC, 9/24/05, p.B2)
38.8k BC Wall decorations in the El Castillo cave in northwestern Spain dated to at least this time.
(SFC, 6/15/12, p.A11)
38k BC Stone-age humans came to Europe, probably from central Asia and the Middle East, in 2 waves of migration that began about this time. DNA evidence from Y-chromosomes in 2000 CE suggested that 4 of 5 European men shared a common ancestor from this 1st wave.
(SFC, 11/10/00, p.A7)
38k BC The oldest fossils found at the La Brea tar pits in southern California dated back to about this time. In 1913 mass excavations began there.
(Econ, 11/9/13, p.85)
38k BC A 30 cm. high figure with human legs, an arm and the head of a lion was carved about this time in southwestern Germany. Its fragments were discovered in 1939 and pieced together over the next three decades.
(Econ, 2/2/13, p.71)
c38k BC In 2003 British scientists found 40,000-year-old human footprints in central Mexico, shattering theories that mankind arrived in the Americas tens of thousands of years later from Asia. The footprints were found in an abandoned quarry close to the Cerro Toluquilla volcano and were subsequently studied and dated by a multinational team of scientists.
(AFP, 7/5/05)
38k BC The carbon dating process can be used to date specimens that were alive as long as 40,000 years ago.
(SFEC, 12/15/96, BR p.7)
c38k BC Volcanic activity on Kauai, Ha., ended about this time.
(SFEC, 8/29/99, p.T6)
38k BC One group of wooly mammoths died off in North America about this time for unknown reasons. The demise of a 2nd group took place about 10,900BC.
(SFC, 6/14/07, p.A22)
38k BC - 1996 Scientists in Australia said that they found a shrub in Tasmania that began growing 40,000 years ago. Dubbed "King's Holly," the plant clones itself and now covers 2 secluded river gullies in the remote southwest.
(SFC, 10/26/96, p.A17)
36k BC A woolly mammoth died on the Texas Gulf Coast. It was unearthed in 2004 and tentatively dated to this time.
(AP, 1/13/04)
36k BC - 34k BC In 2002 the jawbone of a cave-man living in what is now Romania was found in Pestera cu Oase. It was reported as the oldest fossil from an early modern human to be found in Europe and was carbon-dated to this time.
(AP, 9/22/03)
35k BC Human kind does not seem to have been addicted to war throughout its history on earth. Paleontologists believe that before about 35,000BC men many have dealt with one another the way higher apes do today. There is conflict among the higher apes, but no warfare.
(V.D.-H.K.p.408)
35k BC This date approximately marks the Neandertal Chatelperronian cultural period with characteristics copied from Aurignacian neighbors.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)(AM, 7/00, p.30)
35k BC In 2008 archeologists unearthed tools dating back at least 35,000 years in a rock shelter in Australia's remote northwest, making it one of the oldest archaeological finds in that part of the country.
(AP, 4/7/08)
35k BC A piece of a stone axe dating to this time was discovered in 2010 on sacred Aboriginal land in Australia, the oldest object of its type ever found. Archeologists said the discovery is evidence that Aboriginal Jawoyn people from Arnhem Land could have been the first to grind axes to sharpen their edges.
(AP, 11/5/10)
35k BC In Australia the Budj Bim volcano erupted about this time. Three overlapping volcanic craters formed Lake Surprise in what later became southwestern Victoria state. The mountain was named Mount Eeles in 1836 by Major Thomas Mitchell after William Eeles of the 95th Regiment of Foot who fought with Mitchell in the Peninsular War. A draftsman's error meant that the name was rendered Eccles from 1845.
(Econ., 2/29/20, p.65)
35k BC - 23k BC In Australia Aboriginal rock paintings were made as far back as this time.
(SFEC, 2/28/99, p.T4)
35k BC - 10k BC The Upper Paleolithic Period. There was considerable variation in the types of tools that were used and according to prehistorian J.D. Clark, a new self-awareness or concern for matters that had no relation to fulfilling biological needs. This is shown by the burial of the dead together with food and weapons.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)(Enc. of Africa, 1976, p.165)
35k BC - 10k BC A rich Paleolithic site, Diuktai Cave, was discovered on the Aldan, a tributary of the Lena in Siberia by Dr. Yuri Mochanov ~1968.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.464)
34k BC A Neanderthal skeleton from this time was found near the village of St. Cesaire, France, in 1979. It indicated survival following a fractured skull.
(WSJ, 4/23/02, p.B1)
34k BC Researchers have confirmed that Neanderthals of this time in central France had more sophisticated stone tools than their predecessors. The tools may have been acquired by trade with Cro-Magnons. The site of the artifacts was Auxierre, France.
(SFC, 5/16/96, p.A-7)
33k BC In 2004 archaeologists of the University of Tuebingen said a 35,000BC-year-old flute made from a woolly mammoth's ivory tusk had been unearthed in a German cave and pieced together from 31 fragments. In 2009 a flute from about this same time, made from vulture bone, was displayed. Its 12 pieces had been found in the Hohle Fels cave in southern Germany.
(AP, 12/11/04)(SFC, 6/25/09, p.A4)
33k BC Ivory carving dating to about this time depicted a busty woman. It was found in 2008 in a German cave and was unveiled in 2009 by archaeologists who believed it to be the oldest known sculpture of the human form. The carving found in six fragments in Germany's Hohle Fels cave depicts a woman with a swollen belly, wide-set thighs and large, protruding breasts.
(AP, 5/14/09)
33k BC About this time scattered hunter-gatherer groups underwent a cultural revolution. For the first time, humans began to create symbols of themselves, of the animals around them, and perhaps of the passage of time.
(NG, Oct. 1988 , p. 440)
c33k BC About this time, or more recently, a catastrophic earthquake carved out the Golden Gate and the waters of the Pacific rushed into the exposed plain to form the SF Bay. [see 8000BC]
(SFEC, 2/9/97, p.W4)
33k BC - 9k BC Europe's Upper Paleolithic age.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 440)
32k BC Late Neandertal skeleton excavated in 1979 CE at St. Cesaire in southwestern France, and studied by French anthropologist Bernard Vandermeersch. The associated stone tools found with the remains were those of Upper Paleolithic man, who displaced the Neanderthals.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p.615-616)
32k BC-30k BC In 2012 A team of Russian scientists revived a plant, Silene stenophylla, whose seeds came from a squirrel’s chamber in Siberian permafrost dating to this time.
(SFC, 2/21/12, p.A4)
32k BC - 21k BC In 2004 Some 70 clay hearths of this age were identified in a single cave in the northwestern Peloponnese.
(Arch, 1/05, p.13)
31k BC In the northern Moluccas humans were visiting the coastal caves of Golo and Wetef on Gebe Island at this time.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.21)
31k BC Stone tools from Monte Verde, Chile, indicate that people lived there about this time.
(SFC, 5/23/98, p.A13)
c30.4k BC Radiocarbon date for the Cave paintings at Chauvet, France. The first period of cave art is called Aurignacian.
(NH, 7/96, p.18,70)
30k BC An ivory pendant strung by a hole at the narrow end bears rows of dots, a common motif 32,000 years ago.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 451)
30k BC Carved body of a man whose arms bear striations was excavated from a cave at Hohlenstein, West Germany. The head is shaped as a lion muzzle.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.467)
30k BC - 22k BC This marks approximately the Gravettian cultural period. [see 26-20k]
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)
30k BC - 14k BC Scientists in 2007 said that prevailing winds in North America during this period blew from the East Coast. The Laurentide Ice Sheet covered much of the eastern two-thirds of the continent deep into the Midwest and the later Middle Atlantic states.
(SFC, 2/15/07, p.A20)
c29k BC Bones with Neanderthal traits from this time were later found in a cave in Mladec, Czech Republic. Some scientists believed they represented interbreeding between Neanderthals and Home Sapiens.
(SSFC, 6/19/05, p.F2)
29k BC Scientists in 2020 reported on artifacts found in a mountain cave in the state of Zacatecas in north-central Mexico. Limestone tools found at the site spanned from 31,000 to 12,500 years old, said archaeologist Ciprian Ardelean of Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas in Mexico, lead author of one of two studies published in the journal Nature.
(Reuters, 7/22/20)
28k BC In 2012 archaeologist Bryce Barker dated the oldest piece of rock art in Australia and one of the oldest in the world: an Aboriginal work created about this time in the Northern Territory rock shelter known as Nawarla Gabarnmang.
(AP, 6/18/12)
28k BC Neanderthals persisted to about this time at the site of Zafarraya in Andalucia, Spain.
(Arch, 9/00, p.53)
28k BC In 2010 it was reported that starch grains found on 30,000-year-old grinding stones suggest that prehistoric man may have dined on an early form of flat bread, contrary to his popular image as primarily a meat-eater. The grinding stones were discovered at sites in Italy, Russia and the Czech Republic.
(Reuters, 10/19/10)
28k BC In 2001 Russian and Norwegian archeologists reported evidence that date to about this time of humans camped at Mamontovaya Kurya on the Usa River at the Arctic circle. A tusk was dated at 36,600 years of age and plant remains at 30,000.
(SFC, 9/6/01, p.E2)
28k BC In 2003 Russian scientists reported evidence of a hunting site on the Yana River, Siberia, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle that dated to about this time.
(SFC, 1/2/04, p.A2)
28k BC The Ainu were the aboriginal inhabitants of the Japanese islands back to this time. They had European features, wavy hair and thick beards before they intermarried with the Japanese.
(SFC, 8/23/97, p.A10)
28k BC Homo sapiens (modern). Skull of adult male found by French workmen (L. Lartet) at Cro-Magnon, France in 1868.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 573)
28k BC The Cussac cave in France was found in 2000 to contain drawings from this time. Bones of 5 people from the Neolithic era were also found.
(SFC, 7/5/01, p.A8)
28.8k BC - 12.2k BC Analysis of core sediment from the bottom of Lake Pata in the western Amazon River basin in 1996 indicated that the area remained covered with lush tropical rain forest during this time of maximum glacial coverage in the northern latitudes.
(LSA, Spg/97, p.32)
27k BC In 2000 DNA analysis of a Neanderthal infant skeleton from this time showed a 7% difference in DNA to modern humans, which indicated that modern humans did not descend from them.
(SFC, 3/29/00, p.A8)(WSJ, 3/29/00, p.A1)
27k BC - 26k BC Neanderthals lived in Croatia. Their remains were later found at the Vindija cave and dated to this time in 1999 with accelerator radiocarbon dating.
(SFC, 10/26/99, p.B3)
26.5k BC The Oruanui eruption of the Taupo volcano in New Zealand took place about this time and was the world's largest known eruption in the past 70,000 years.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taupo_Volcano)(Econ., 4/11/15, p.24)
26k BC France's Dordogne Valley is the site of caves in Le Conte cliff where items such as the illustrated ivory bead or button have been found.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 451)
26k BC Experts in 2006 reported that charcoal evidence indicated that small bands of Neanderthals took refuge in Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar about this time.
(SFC, 9/14/06, p.A9)
26k BC In Sungir, an open-air settlement northeast of later-day Moscow, people were being buried with thousands of carved ivory beads and little wheel-shaped bone ornaments.
(Econ, 12/22/07, p.131)
26k BC - 20k BC This marks approximately the Gravettian (see 30-22k) cultural period. It was named after the southern French site of La Gravette.
(AM, 9/01, p.12)
26k BC - 16k BC Africa’s oldest known rock art dated to about this time at a site in Namibia.
(Econ, 5/3/08, p.56)
25k BC San Francisco and the Bay Area were home to mammoths indicating cold temperatures of an Ice Age. In 1934 a 10-pound mammoth tooth from this time was found by engineers working on the new Bay Bridge. In 1983 SF workers building the foundation of the Pansini Building at Pacific and Columbus found fossilized mammal bones that dated back to this time.
(SSFC, 1/15/09, DB p.43)(SFC, 8/3/13, p.C3)
25k BC In 2005 archaeologists in northern Austria reported finding the remains of two newborns dating back 27,000 years while excavating a hillside near Krems. The newborns were buried beneath mammoth bones and with a string of 31 beads, suggesting that the internment involved some sort of ritual.
(AP, 9/26/05)
25k BC In 2006 France took over ownership of a cave in the Vilhonneur forest where a human skeleton that dated to this time was found in a decorated room.
(SFC, 6/3/06, p.A2)
25k BC The earliest known atlatl dated to this time. This example from France of the device, use to throw a spear, was made of reindeer antler.
(Econ, 4/12/08, p.90)
25k BC Sand rock art from Namibia, part of an art exhibit of African Art, is dated to this period.
(WSJ, 11/16/95, p.A-18)
24k BC An early representation of a human was carved from mammoth ivory about 26,000 years ago. It was discovered in Brno, Czechoslovakia. The tiny "Venus of Dolni Vestonici," more than 25,000 years old, is the earliest known sculpture of a human figure.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 440)(SFEC, 5/23/99, DB p.43)
24k BC A multiple burial was unearthed at Dolni Vestonice, Czechoslovakia. Three skeletons whose skulls were adorned with circles of arctic fox and wolf teeth and ivory beads.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.466)
23k BC An ivory head known as the Venus of Brassenpouy named after the site of its recovery in France bears distinct facial features and coiffure. A bird bone flute of similar age is here illustrated.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 449)
23k BC Homo erectus survived in Indonesia to about this time.
(Arch, 1/05, p.14)
23k BC The oldest known baked clay figurine (11 cm) is from Dolni Vestonice, now at the Moravian museum.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 459)
23k BC Lake Bonneville crested and covered some 20,000 sq. miles over what is now Utah, Nevada, and Idaho.
(NH, 9/96, p.62)
23k BC Puget Sound off the state of Washington was carved by glaciers 25,000 years ago.
(AAM, 3/96, p.84)
23k BC - 10k BC The Sandia Cave in New Mexico provided human shelter back to this period and was excavated by archeologist Frank Hibben in the 1930s after it was discovered by Boy Scouts.
(SFEC, 5/30/99, p.T8)
23k BC - 18k BC The last glacial maximum took place over this period.
(SFC, 1/2/04, p.A2)
22.5k BC On Nov 28, 1998, Portuguese archeologists led by Dr. Joao Zilhao found the skeleton of a young boy (the Lagar Velho child) in the Lapedo Valley, who reportedly exhibited both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens features, the first possible hybrid to be found.
(SFEC, 4/25/99, p.A4)(AM, 7/00, p.25)
22000BC In 2017 it was reported that archeological studies at the Bluefish Caves in Canada’s Yukon territory showed evidence that animal bones dating to about this time had been stripped of their flesh by stone tools.
(Econ, 2/25/17, p.70)
c22k BC The last ice age began and humans in Europe retreated to Spain, the Balkans and the Ukraine.
(SFC, 11/10/00, p.A7)
22k BC - 18k BC This marks approximately the Solutrian cultural period. Researcher in 1999 proposed that people of this culture crossed the Atlantic from the Iberian peninsula and settled on the eastern American seaboard.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)(SFC, 11/1/99, p.A9)
c21k BC In 2021 it was reported that human footprints found in New Mexico are about 23,000 years old, suggesting that people may have arrived long before the Ice Age’s glaciers melted.
(NY Times, 9/24/21)
c21k BC Plant remains from this time were found at the Ohalo II site on the shore of the Sea of Galilee indicating use of barley and perhaps other grains in the human diet.
(SFC, 6/22/04, p.A3)(SFC, 8/16/04, p.A6)(Econ, 8/7/04, p.65)
c21k BC In Mexico the Popocatepetl volcano erupted with a force equal to the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington.
(SFEC, 5/16/99, Z1 p.8)
21k BC - 18k BC In 2008 researchers reported that DNA evidence indicated that 95% of native Americans had descended from 6 women of this period. It was believed that the women had lived in Beringia, a land bridge that stretched from Asia to North America during this time.
(SFC, 3/14/08, p.A12)
21k BC - 18k BC The site of Kostenki by the River Don was inhabited for ~3,000 years when glaciers moved in. Shelters were built partly underground for warmth with large mammoth bones. The site was first excavated in 1879 CE and includes human burials, animal bones, female figures of limestone and ivory, necklaces of arctic fox teeth, and headbands of mammoth ivory.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 449)
20k BC In Australia scientists in 2005 said hundreds of human footprints dating back 20,000 years were discovered in a dry lake bed near Willandra Lakes, southwest of Sydney.
(Reuters, 12/21/05)
20k BC Some scientists believe that ancient people from Siberia crossed the Bering land bridge about this time and began their southward migration into the Americas. In 2001 skull measurements indicated that members of the Jomon-Ainu of Japan made the first crossings.
(SFC, 5/23/98, p.A13)(SFC, 7/31/01, p.A4)
20k BC-15k BC In 2019 archaeologists in Mexico found the bones of about 60 mammoths at an airport under construction just north of Mexico City, near human-built ’traps’. The bones were found in sediment layers corresponding to 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
(AP, 5/22/20)
20k BC - 10k BC This was a generally wet period.
(NH, 9/96, p.32)
20k BC - 5k BC In 2004 Stephen Mithen authored “After the Ice: A Global Human History," an account of human survival during this period.
(Arch, 1/05, p.54)
18k BC Innovations in weapon design included the spear thrower invented about this time.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 451)
c18k BC In 1999 a French-led expedition chopped clear the fully preserved carcass of a 20 thousand-year-old woolly mammoth, the "Jarkov Mammoth," from the permafrost of Siberia at Khatanga, Russia.
(SFC, 10/21/99, p.A1)
c18k BC Researchers in 1999 proposed that Solutrean people crossed the Atlantic from the Iberian peninsula and settled on the eastern American seaboard.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 447)(SFC, 11/1/99, p.A9)
c18k BC In Zimbabwe caves in the Matopos Hills were decorated with paintings.
(WSJ, 12/9/98, p.A13)
18k BC - 11k BC This marks approximately the Magdalenian cultural period. It was named after the site of La Madeleine, France, marked by fine art and tool-making and the use of bone for harpoons, spear points, and other purposes.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 489,495)
17.8k BC - 12.8k BC Tasmania, a Paleolithic site was filled with bones and stones and the charcoal from cooking hearths. The remains are 90% wallaby and 8% wombat.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.466)
17.5k BC Dr. D.J. Mulvaney in 1961 and 1964 unearthed human artifacts at Carnarvon National Park in Queensland, Australia, subsequently dated at 19,500 years.
(SF E&C, 1/15/1995, T-4)
17k BC A site at Meadowcroft ,Pa., has been carbon dated for human habitation to this age.
(USAT, 2/11/97, p.A1)
17k BC - 15k BC The Cactus Hill site, 45 miles south of Richmond, Va., was reported in 2000 to contain evidence of human settlers from this period.
(SFC, 4/7/00, p.A2)
16k BC The last major glaciation reaches its maximum. The English channel was dry; Australia adjoined Tasmania and New Guinea. Venice lay 200 miles from the sea.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 446)
16k BC A mile-high glacier covered the area of Connecticut.
(WSJ, 9/3/98, p.A16)
16k BC On Manhattan Island the ice was a half-mile thick. In western North America, the ice covered parts of Washington, Idaho, Montana, and all of Western Canada. In Europe it buried Scandinavia and Scotland, most of Great Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, much of Poland and much of the Soviet Union. In the Southern Hemisphere, there was ice in Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina. See levels fell by 350 feet.
(NOHY, Weiner, 3/90, p.102)
16k BC The glaciers in North America from New Jersey to Seattle began to recede.
(NH, 5/96, p.30)
16k BC The west coast of North America deglaciated by this time allowing people, who had crossed the Bering Strait land bridge, to move south.
(SFC, 4/4/08, p.A4)
16k BC In Sep, 2003, a 3-foot-tall adult female skeleton was found in a cave believed to be 18,000 years old. A trove of fragmented bones accounted for as many as seven primitive individuals that lived on the equatorial island of Flores, located east of Java and northwest of Australia. Scientists have named the extinct species Homo floresiensis. Scientists in 2005 said the group emerged some 95,000 years earlier and went extinct about 12,000 years ago. In 2009 new studies suggested the people, dubbed hobbits, were a previously unknown species altogether.
(AP, 10/27/04)(SFC, 10/28/04, p.A1)(SFC, 3/4/05, p.A2)(AP, 5/7/09)
16k BC - 9k BC Sculptures of stone, bone, ivory and clay record animals familiar to the Cro-Magnon peoples, whose artistic expertise peaked in France and Spain during this time.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 620)
15.59k BC Saber tooth cats roamed the hills north of Las Vegas about this time. Fossils of the front legs of such a cat were identified in 2012.
(SFC, 12/17/12, p.A5)
15k BC The Barents Sea ice sheet, stretching from northern England to Siberia, disintegrated in a period perhaps less than 1000 years, probably because of warming seas.
(Econ, 6/16/12, SR p.7)
15k BC The cave art of Paleolithic man of Lascaux, France dates to this time. It contains some 600 paintings, 1,500 engravings, and innumerable mysterious dots and geometric figures.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.434,485)
c15k BC The San Francisco west coast extended out 6 miles past the Farallon Islands.
(SFC, 12/20/99, p.A8)
c15k BC Dogs first began to associate with some humans as people began to form settlements.
(WSJ, 11/22/02, p.B1)
15k BC - 13k BC During the last Ice Age dams of glacial meltwater repeatedly failed and eroded land in southeastern Washington state and Oregon. This exposed petrified logs in what later became Gingko Petrified Forest State Park. An ice dam, which blocked the Clark Fork River in Montana and created lake Missoula, broke at least 40 times and caused cataclysmic floods. One Missoula flood left Portland under 400 feet of water.
(CW, Fall ‘03, p.20)(SSFC, 9/12/04, p.D9)
15k BC - 12k BC The Solutrean phase of the Upper Paleolithic is named after the Roche de Solutre near Macon, France.
(SFEC, 11/21/99, p.T4)
15k BC - 10k BC The Mesolithic or Middle Stone Age.
(WH, 1994, p.19)
14.6k BC - 14.1k BC A canine jaw, dating to this time, was found in Switzerland in 1873. Analysis in 2010 indicated the age of the bone and proved humans were keeping dogs at this time.
(SFC, 8/4/10, p.A2)
14.5k BC In 1962 Robert B. Fox, an American anthropologist of the National Museum of the Philippines, discovered fossilized fragments of a skull and jawbone of three individuals. These were believed to be the earliest human remains known in the Philippines. Tabon Man refers to these remains discovered in the Tabon Caves in Lipuun Point in Quezon, Palawan and dated back to about this time. In 2007 a metatarsal from the Callao Man was discovered and dated in 2010 by uranium-series dating as being 67,000 years old.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabon_Man)
14k BC A 35 cm (14-inch) stone head that seems to be half man and half lion or leopard, found in the El Juyo cave, in the foothills southwest of Santander, Spain. Anthropologists suggest the cave held a sanctuary for religious rituals.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 623)
14k BC Several thousand engravings are made at La Marche, France, mostly of animals but also including some humans.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 448)
14k BC The bas-relief of a bison on a limestone slab was found in a shelter at Angles-sur-l'Anglin, France.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 452)
14k BC The earliest fossils of domestic dogs date to this time. They were found in Germany.
(MT, Fall 02, p.14)
14k BC - 10k BC Rock art was inscribed in the Coso Mountains of California. In 2005 the area was designated as the Coso Rock Art National Historic Landmark.
(SSFC, 10/23/05, p.F12)
14k BC – 9k BC The Columbia mammoths, Mammuthus columbi, went extinct during this period. The species grew as tall as 14 feet and ranged widely in California. Remains were later found as far south as Florida and Central America.
(SFC, 3/31/11, p.A13)
13.5k BC A sandstone tablet from the Enlene cave in the French Pyrenees, excavated by R. Begouen and J. Clottes. Fragments were found between 1930 and 1983 and reveal possible human figures and a definite bison.
(NG. Nov. 1985, p. 618)
13.5k BC ¬- 11.2k BC In 2011 archeologists reported the discovery of 56 stone tools found in central Texas dating to about this time. The dating prefigured the “Clovis culture" by about 2 thousand years.
(SFC, 3/25/11, p.A7)
13k BC Archeologist Tom Dillehay and others believe that the first people arrived in the Americas about this time.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.62)
c13k BC Human teeth and skull fragments from the Pedra Faruda site of Piaui state, Brazil, were carbon dated to this time. Niede Guidon began excavations at the site in 1970.
(SFEC, 2/20/00, p.A18)
13k BC Early Natufian settlements began in the Middle East according to archeological evidence later found in Jordan. A drying climate from 10,800 BC to 9,500 BC made them nomadic again. A 2nd attempt to settle began around 9.500 BC and became known as Pre-Pottery Neolithic.
(Econ, 6/27/09, p.86)
13k BC An ivory plaque excavated at Malta in Siberia was designed with circles of dots, a possible indication of marking time.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 440)
13k BC About this time the Barents Ice Shelf, a vast piece of ice that sat north of Scandinavia, collapsed into the sea. It may have raised sea level by more than ten feet per century for nearly five centuries.
(NOHY, Weiner, 3/90, p.109)
13k BC The Lake Missoula Floods occurred as recently as 15,000 years ago.
(Smith., 4/95, p.50)
13k BC The Great Lakes originated about this time.
(NH, 7/98, p.68)
13k BC A supernova explosion occurred about 15,000 years ago that is revealed as the Cygnus Loop, the expanding blast wave of the explosion.
(NH, 8/96, p.72)
13k BC Mt. St. Helen's in Washington State erupted about this time. It left a sediment of ash in between layers of sediment from the glacial floods of Lake Missoula. This evidence indicates that there may have been as many as a hundred gigantic floods from Lake Missoula repeatedly breaking the glacial ice build-up.
(Smith., 4/1995, p.58)
13k BC -9.5k BC The Natufians were hunter-gatherers who lived in the eastern Mediterranean region during this period, and began settling down rather than roving from place to place. In 2018 Archaeologists reported finding what they believe is the world's oldest site for alcohol production in the Raqefet cave south of Haifa in today's northern Israel. The location also served as a burial site for the Natufian people. Their beer-like beverage may have been served in ceremonies around 11,000BC.
(AFP, 9/13/18)
13k BC - 8k BC Stanley J. Olsen, author of the "Origins of the Domestic Dog" (1985), posits that Paleolithic hunter-gatherers domesticated various subspecies of wolf during this time period in northern Europe, North America, the Near East and China.
(Nat. Hist. 3/96, p.36)
12.638k BC A very rapid sea level rise is thought to have occurred 14,650 years ago but details about the event have been unclear. In 2012 scientists said the collapse of an ice sheet in Antarctica about this time might have caused sea levels to rise between 14 and 18 meters (46-60 feet).
(Reuters, 3/29/12)
c12.5k BC The Altamira Cave in Spain and its wall paintings dated to this time. The cave was rediscovered in 1879 by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, a lawyer and amateur archeologist.
(WSJ, 9/18/01, p.A20)
12.5k BC-10.5k BC Paleolithic era cave drawings were created at the Atxurra cave in the northern Basque region during this period. Some 70 drawings in the cave were found in 2016 on ledges 1,000 feet underground.
(SFC, 5/28/16, p.A2)
12.3k BC In 2008 scientists reported that fossilized human feces found in 8 caves near Paisley, Ore., dated to about this time. The coprolites contained DNA with characteristics matching those of living Amerindians.
(SFC, 4/4/08, p.A4)(Econ, 4/5/08, p.84)
12k BC The last ice age ended about this time flooding the land bridge between Alaska and Siberia.
(SFC, 4/4/08, p.A4)
c12k BC The Broken Mammoth settlement in central Alaska dated to this time.
(SFC, 7/25/03, p.A1)
c12k BC In 2004 archaeologists in Kansas working near the Colorado-Kansas border reported radiocarbon dating results finished in February that showed mammoth and prehistoric camel bones dating back to about this time.
(AP, 6/13/05)
12k BC In 2008 evidence from Monte Verde, Chile, indicated that a small band of people inhabited the area. Initial evidence was found in a peat bog there in 1977.
(SFC, 5/9/08, p.A8)(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Verde)
12k BC Bison are shaped from moist clay in the Tuc d'Audoubert cave of the French Pyranees, discovered in 1912 CE.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 443)
12k BC The Niaux cave in Tarascon, France, dated back to the Ice Age.
(SFEC, 5/30/99, p.T1)
12k BC As the earth warmed, the rain forest came up. It pushed away the wallabies, the wombats, the possums, and so the people (of Tasmania) had to follow their food.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.467)
c12k BC During the last ice age the Channel Islands off California were part of one vast island geologists call Santarosae. The northern islands were linked, but probably not with the mainland.
(SFEC, 4/26/98, p.T11)
12k BC Lake Lahontan, which spread across northwest Utah, reached its highest level during the last phase of the last Ice Age.
(NH, 9/96, p.35)
12k BC The first known fossil evidence of human-canine cohabitation dates to about this time.
(SFC, 6/13/97, p.A10)
12k BC - 10k BC A site along the Nile River in Sudan has a graveyard (Site 117) of this period that indicates warfare between communities.
(NH, Jul, p.31)
11.5k BC - 10.2k BC A site near Kenosha, Wisc., indicates human butchery of woolly mammoths during this period.
(Arch, 7/02, p.50)
11.05k BC - 10.9k BC Clovis points (from Clovis New Mexico), tools of Paleo-Indian hunters (known as Clovis people), were dated in 2007 to this period. They pursued ice-age mammoths, camels, bison and horses. These people were ancestral to the Folsom culture and were believed to have arrived across a land bridge from Asia. Clovis culture was reported to be very similar to Solutrean.
(NH, 2/97, p.22)(SFC, 11/1/99, p.A9)(Arch, 7/02, p.51)(SFC, 2/23/07, p.A4)
11k BC The last warming period began about 13,000 years ago. It melted the glaciers and put Beringia back under the Bering Sea.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.434)
11k BC A cooling period in the northern hemisphere, called the Younger Dryas, began about this time and lasted for over a thousand years.
(Econ, 5/26/07, p.94)
11k BC A mass extinction about this time occurred in parts of North America and coincided with the growing population of Indian hunters [see 10,900BC].
(SFC, 1/8/99, p.A2)
11k BC Scientists in 2005 said archeological sites dating to this time in Michigan, Canada, Arizona, New Mexico, and the Carolinas showed evidence, magnetic metal spherules, for a comet impact that may have wiped out North American mammoths and many other animals [see 10,900BC].
(SFC, 9/24/05, p.B2)
11k BC In 2008 Colorado landscapers in Boulder stumbled onto a cache of more than 83 ancient tools buried by the Clovis people, ice age hunter-gatherers, dating back 13,000 years.
(AP, 2/27/09)
11k BC Scientists in 2009 said an oak bush in the Jurupa Hills of Riverside County, Ca., was about 13,000 years old, dating to about this time.
(SFC, 12/23/09, p.A8)
11k BC Scientists in 2001-2002 discovered skeletons in caves along Mexico’s Yucatan coast that dated to about this time.
(SFC, 9/10/04, p.A2)
11k BC Peñon Woman, found in central Mexico in 1959, dated to about this time. She shared many of the features found in the Kennewick Man (1996) of Washington State.
(Econ, 7/16/05, p.77)
11k BC In 2007 Alberto Nava, a California cave diver, and two Mexican dive budies discovered a human skeleton in a deep underwater cave in Mexico’s Yucatan jungle. In 2014 scientists said the skeleton was that of a young girl who probably fell into the cave about this time. DNA evidence linked her to modern native Americans.
(SFC, 5/16/14, p.D8)
11k BC The earliest amber artifacts are from this time and were found in caves in Cheddar, England. The British Isles were connected to Europe and the English Channel could be walked across.
(PacDis, Winter/'97, p.9)
11k BC In 2016 Danish archaeologists found some hunting tools in Horsens dating to this time that gave insight into how some of the first people in Denmark lived.
(AP, 2/10/17)
11k BC A Paleolithic burial in San Teodoro Cave, Sicily, revealed an arrowhead embedded in the pelvis bone of an adult female. Another arrowhead is known from the vertebra of a child buried in the Grotte des Enfants on the Italian coast.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.24)
11k BC A meteorite from Mars (ALH 84001), discovered in 1984, landed in Antarctica about this time. It had been knocked into space from Mars around 16 million BC. Scientists in 1996 claimed to have found evidence of organic minerals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, in the meteorite that formed some 3.6 billion years ago.
(SFC, 8/7/96, p.A1,9)(SSFC, 2/19/06, p.M6)
11k BC-10k BC In 2014 scientists reported on a female skull, dating to about this time, found by divers at the Hoyo Negro Yucatan cave. They described her as Palaeoamerican, part of a small group whose remains do not resemble modern native Americans.
(Econ, 5/17/14, p.75)
11k BC - 9k BC A woman's bones were discovered in 1959 at Arlington Canyon on Santa Rosa Island, one of the Channel Islands off California. Two tests in 1999 dated the bones as 11,000 and 13,000 years of age.
(SFC, 4/12/99, p.A1,15)
11k BC - 4k BC Trinidad was once part of the South American continent. The lowlands to the continent flooded either after the melt of the last Ice Age or more recently from erosion caused by the Orinoco River of Venezuela.
(SFEC,2/16/97, p.T5)
10.9k BC Wildfires about this time broke out across the US and Canada after an object, roughly a kilometer across, grazed the Earth and broke up in the atmosphere depositing its oomph as heat. A mass extinction about this time occurred in parts of North America and coincided with the growing population of Indian hunters. Archeologists later identified a layer of charcoal and glass-like beads of carbon as evidence of the event. Fires melted substantial portions of the Laurentide glacier in Canada sending waves of water down the Mississippi that caused changes in the Atlantic Ocean currents. This started a 1,300-year ice age known as the Younger Dryas.
(SFC, 1/8/99, p.A2)(Econ, 5/26/07, p.94)(SFC, 1/2/09, p.A2)
10.8k BC - 10.3k BC A village in Monte Verde, Chile was identified to be this old by a team of anthropologists. The site is described in the 1997 book: "Monte Verde: A Pleistocene Settlement in Chile" by Tom Dillehay. Dillehay later reported that new excavations revealed evidence that human bones and tools may date back to about 28,000BC.
(USAT, 2/11/97, p.A1)(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.61)(SFC, 2/17/98, p.A2)
10.8k BC - 9.5k BC People of Early Natufian settlement in the Middle East were forced to go nomadic again due to a drying climate over this period. A 2nd attempt to settle began around 9,500 BC and became known as Pre-Pottery Neolithic.
(Econ, 6/27/09, p.86)
10.7k BC Melting glaciers caused a deluge of some 2,000 cubic miles of fresh water from a prehistoric lake in southwestern Ontario. This impacted the Atlantic thermohaline circulation and sent temperatures over the North Atlantic plummeting. Temperatures in Greenland dropped by 18 degrees Fahrenheit.
(WSJ, 7/17/03, p.A1)(WSJ, 5/14/04, p.B1)
c10.5k BC The climate of the Earth abruptly warmed by 20 degrees or more and ended an ice age. Ice cores from Greenland later revealed a temperature increase of almost 59 degrees in the north polar region within a 50-year period.
(SFC, 10/2/98, p.A10)
10.4k BC - 10.2k BC In 2003 Scientists reported that human bone fragments found in a cave from Aveline's Hole in the Mendip Hills of southwest England date from this period.
(AP, 9/23/03)
10.3k BC In 2021 it was reported that scientists have unearthed evidence of a milestone in human culture, the earliest-known use of tobacco, in the remnants of a hearth built by early inhabitants of North America's interior about this time in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert. Until then, the earliest documented use of tobacco came in the form of nicotine residue found inside a smoking pipe from Alabama dating to 3,300 years ago.
(Reuters, 10/11/21)
10k BC The Paleolithic period comes to a close.
(NG, Nov. 1985, p. 623)
10k BC The Nez Perce are a North American Indian people of the Sahaptin family. The name is from the French and means pierced nose. They lived in the Wallowa Valley of Oregon, Washington and Idaho for some 12,000 years.
(WUD, 1994, p.964)
10k BC Little Petroglyph and an adjacent canyon in the Coso Mountains, northwest of the Mojave Desert, contains carvings dated to this time.
(PacDis, Summer '97, p.8,10)
c10k BC Petroglyphs dating to this time were later discovered in the Big Smokey Valley of Nevada, where Lake Tolyabe and Lake Tonopah provided for human habitation.
(USDI, 2004)
10k BC The 1st known outbreaks of smallpox occurred about this time among agricultural settlements in northeastern Africa.
(SFC, 10/19/01, p.A17)
10k BC This marks the approximate time of the Natufian cultural stage, just before the domestication of plants and the spread of settled farming groups. The Natufians were the last group to occupy Kebara cave in Israel for a long period.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p.463)
c10k BC Hunter gatherers settled for part of the year at a site later called Wadi Hammeh in the Jordan Valley.
(NH, 11/1/04, p.15)
10k BC In 2008 archeologists in northern Israel found a female skeleton in a grave containing 50 tortoise shells, a leopard pelvis, a cow tail and part of an eagle wing and believed they were the remains of a witch doctor from the Natufian culture.
(AP, 11/18/08)
10k BC Ice from this period is stored at the Physics Inst. of the Univ. of Bern, Switzerland.
(NOHY, 3/1990, p.240)
10k BC Austronesians began to settle the island of Taiwan about this time. Their descendents became known as the aboriginal Seediq people.
(Econ, 9/17/11, p.41)
10k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
10k BC The world’s human population was about 5 million.
(Econ, 12/24/05, Survey p.9)
10k BC - 3.5k BC The Neolithic or New Stone Age.
(WH, 1994, p.19)
10k BC - 400 BC The Jomon culture of Japan is associated with the introduction of rice agriculture and the use of metal and probably came from the Asian mainland.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.34)
10k BC – 1.5k AD The Bachwezi people, also known as the Ancient Cwezi or Chwezi, were a group of people who legends say ruled the Empire of Kitara (Empire of the Sun), which encompassed a vast area including modern day Uganda, Sudan, northern Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia and Malawi during this period.
(http://tinyurl.com/uov9agu)
9.58k BC The Shigir Idol, a nine-foot-tall totem pole, was carved about this time near Kirovgrad, Russia. In 1890 it was dug out of a peat bog by gold miners. In 2014 advanced technology yielded dated the idol to about this time as Eurasia was still transitioning out of the last ice age.
(NY Times, 3/23/21)
9k BC Canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) is believed to have originated about this time in a single dog. By 2016 it was found in dogs worldwide.
(Econ, 5/21/16, p.70)
9.6k BC Radiocarbon date for the cave paintings at Le Portal, France. The last period of cave art is called Magdalenian.
(NH, 7/96, p.18)
9.6k BC A site of human habitation in Peru was dated to about this time. Later excavations indicated complex stone tools that appeared to date back to at least 28,000BC.
(SFC, 2/17/98, p.A2)
9.6k BC - 8.5k BC Some dozen villages piled one on top of the other occupied the site of Jerf el-Ahmar at a bend of the Euphrates River. In 1999 Syria flooded the area under the Tishrin Dam.
(AM, 11/00, p.56)
9.5k BC In 2011 scientists identified the cremated bones, dating to about this time, of a 3-year-old child buried in the Tanana lowlands of central Alaska.
(SFC, 2/25/11, p.A8)
c9.5k BC A female skull, aged 20-25, from this period was found near Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in c1995 and named Luzia. It was found to have characteristics similar to people from the South Pacific.
(SFC, 5/23/98, p.A13)
9.5k BC Romito 2, a dwarf from a cave in Italy's Calabria region, suffered from a form of chondrodystrophy, a lack of normal cartilage growth and stood no more than four feet. That he lived to about 17 years of age indicates group support. He was found buried with an old woman, possibly his mother.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 452)
c9.5k BC Two cultures of migrating hunters lived in the present territory of Lithuania in the 2nd half of the 10th millennium BC. One group came from the banks of the middle Vistula river in the south-west. The other was from the north-west of Europe.
(DrEE, 10/12/96, p.2)(TB-Com, 10/11/00)
9.5k BC People of the Early Natufian settlements in the Middle East began to settle for a 2nd time following 1300 years of drying climate. They became known as Pre-Pottery Neolithic.
(Econ, 6/27/09, p.86)
9.5k BC - 6.1k BC The Neolithic site of Abu Hureyra, 40 miles downstream from Jerf el-Ahmar, Syria, was flooded under the waters of the Taqba Dam in the 1970s.
(AM, 11/00, p.58)
9.4k BC - 9.2k BC In 2006 researchers reported the discovery of nine carbonized fig fruits stored in Gilgal I, an early Neolithic village, located in the Lower Jordan Valley, which dated to this time.
(Reuters, 6/2/06)
9k BC Humans reached Florida at least by this time, before the end of the Ice Age. Sea level was lower and the peninsula was much larger.
(NH, 11/96, p.46)
9k BC Harpoon heads of intricate design were in use by this time. They were hafted to wooden shafts and easily replaced.
(NG, Oct. 1988, p. 451)
9k BC The wooly mammoth became extinct about 11,000 years ago. [article about the atlatl, i.e. spear thrower]
(WSJ, 10/24/95, p.A-1)
9k BC Fisher in the late 1980's, while he was excavating an 11,000-year-old mastodon found at the Heisler site in southern Michigan, found evidence of butchery and under water meat caching by Ice Age hunters in North America.
(LSA, Fall 1995, p.38)
9k BC Caribou lived in the area of Connecticut.
(WSJ, 9/3/98, p.A16)
9k BC Archeologists in 2010 reported that a circular shaped home was built about this time next to an ancient lake at Star Carr, near Scarborough, in northeastern England. At this time Britain was still connected to continental Europe.
(AP, 8/11/10)(SFC, 8/12/10, p.A2)
c9k BC Plato later wrote that the island continent of Atlantis existed about this time. In 1998 Richard Ellis wrote an account of the Atlantis literature: "Imagining Atlantis."
(SFEC, 7/26/98, BR p.3)
9k BC In 2007 French archaeologists discovered an 11,000-year-old wall painting underground in northern Syria which they believe is the oldest in the world. The 2 square-meter painting, in red, black and white, was found at the Neolithic settlement of Djade al-Mughara on the Euphrates, northeast of the city of Aleppo.
(Reuters, 10/11/07)
9k BC The town of Chemi Shanidar, later part of Iraq, was the largest city of the time with 150 people.
(SFEC, 8/27/00, Z1 p.2)
9k BC Human middens began piling up along the coast of Peru reflecting a diet of tropical mollusks.
(SFC, 9/13/96, p.A2)
c9k BC - 8k BC In Neolithic times Mongolia was the home of small groups of hunters, reindeer breeders, and nomads.
(www.gobiexpeditions.com)
9k BC - 4k BC The finest record of Mesolithic and Neolithic peoples exists in Denmark, due to the country's numerous bogs.
(PacDis, Winter/'97, p.9)
8.6k BC Irish Elk (Megaloceros giganteus) lived in temperate climates throughout Europe and western Asia from about this time to a last record in Ireland at 10,600 years ago.
(NH, 8/96, p.17)
8.2k BC Archaeologists in 2007 found tools in the seabed off Cyprus at two sites indicating they were used by seafaring foragers who frequented the island well over 10,000 years ago, before the first permanent settlers arrived around 8,200 BC.
(AP, 7/19/07)
8.024k BC In 1976 scientists in southern California scientists unearthed skeletal remains dating to about this time. They were among the oldest ever found in the Western Hemisphere.
(AP, 1/15/12)
8k BC The Holocene (completely-recent) Epoch, our current age began 10,000 years ago.
(CEH, GHMC,1979, p.24)(LSA, Spg/97, p.6)
8k BC In 1958 anthropologist Frank Livingstone proposed that Plasmodium falciprum, the deadliest of 4or 5 parasites that cause human malaria, hopped from chimps to humans about this time and human hunter-gatherers began settling on farms.
(Econ, 8/8/09, p.69)
8k BC In 2007 new genetic analysis suggested that the transformation of a vicious predator into a docile tabby took place about this time in the remote deserts of the Middle East.
(www.livescience.com/animals/070628_cat_family.html)
8k BC About this time Vulcan’s Throne was formed from a volcanic eruption near the rim of the inner gorge of the Grand Canyon over Toroweap Canyon, Az.
(NH, 9/97, p.40)
8k BC In 2007 workers digging at the future site of a Wal-Mart store in suburban Mesa, Az., unearthed the bones of a prehistoric camel that's estimated to be about 10,000 years old.
(AP, 4/28/07)
8k BC Researchers in 1986 dated a clay floor in Stanislaus National Forest, 150 miles east of SF, to this time.
(SFC, 9/19/97, p.A3)
8k BC About 10,000 years ago a tribe of Indians lived in the Florida panhandle at the Aucilla River for a few generations near the present town of Perry. The site was nearly 100 miles inland. Within a hundred years rising water flooded the village and sealed the remains under a layer of clay.
(SFC, 11/11/96, p.D1)(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.17)
8k BC In Nevada about this time the Lathrop Wells Cone erupted. It is less than a mile from Yucca Mountain, a site later proposed for the long-term storage of radioactive waste.
(Smith., 5/95, p.44)
8k BC Early bison hunters of the American southwest were named the Folsom People after a nearby town. Bones of the Bison antiquus were initially discovered by cowboy George McJunkin in 1908 in eastern New Mexico.
(NH, 2/97, p.17)
8k BC Mastodons roamed over Ohio. In 1887 Newton S. Conway discovered the skeleton of a mastodon on his farm on the Clark-Champaign County line. It became known as the Conway Mastodon.
(SSFC, 1/9/11, p.A10)(http://tinyurl.com/2ecv34t)
8k BC In 1903 the skeleton of a man, 10,000 years old, was discovered in the underground caves at Cheddar, 130 miles west of London, England. In 2018 scientists from Britain's Natural History Museum and University College London said DNA from the skeleton, named "Cheddar Man," suggests the oldest-known Briton had dark skin and blue eyes.
(SFC, 3/8/96, p.A8)(AP, 2/7/18)
8k BC A genetic mutation among northern Europeans about this time made lactose tolerance continue beyond childhood.
(WSJ, 2/12/0/09, p.A11)
8k BC Asian peoples settled the island of Taiwan about this time.
(SSFC, 2/18/07, p.G6)
8k BC In Taiwan twined hemp cord was decoratively pressed into the side of clay vessels. As of 2015 this was the earliest known use of hemp.
(SSFC, 1/18/15, p.E6)
8k BC It is believed that the Chinese became to first to domesticate wild boars about this time.
(Econ, 12/20/14, p.68)
8k BC About this time Thingvallavatn Lake, a flooded graben in southwestern Iceland, was born in a valley gauged from volcanic rock and ash by the Langjokull Glacier.
(NH, 6/96, p.48)
c8k BC Traces of a man-made shelter from this time were found in northern South Africa north of Johannesburg.
(SFC, 1/15/99, p.A14)
8k BC The potato was first cultivated some 10,000 years ago by South American Indians. In the 16th century Spanish explorers brought potatoes back to Europe, where it was first used primarily as livestock feed. The potato was introduced to North America in the 17th century. In the 18th century, the poor of Europe began to use potatoes as a replacement for cereals in their diets. The failure of the potato crop in Ireland in 1845-46 led to great famine and pushed tens of thousands of Irish to emigrate to the United States. In 2008 it was reported that genetic studies by potato experts indicated that all potatoes originated over 10,000 years ago from a single ancestor, Solanum brevicaule, found on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca.
(HNQ, 5/10/98)(SSFC, 10/5/08, p.A15)
c8k BC The West Antarctic ice sheet started retreating at a rate of about 2 inches per year.
(SFC, 1/3/03, p.A7)
8k BC There is good evidence that the continental crust is capable of some plastic flow, and the rebound is shown most dramatically in parts of the Baltic, the Arctic and the Great Lakes regions of North America where Pleistocene beaches and coastal features are now raised high above sea level and some are tilted. The process seems to have been going on for the last 10,000 years and is still continuing.
(DD-EVTT)
8k BC Sand of Ocean Beach and on hills of western San Francisco. Alluvium of river bottoms. Silts and muds of Sacramento Delta.
(GH-CEH, p.25)
c8k BC Rising ocean waters flowed into the Golden Gate and formed the nascent SF Bay.
(SFC, 12/20/99, p.A8)
8k BC Pigmy mammoths browsed on the Channel Islands off the California coast.
(SFEC, 1/18/98, Z1 p.1)
8k BC Grinding tools from this time were found in 1999 in the Cross Creek site of San Luis Obispo. Beads, shells, tools, seeds and carved stone fish suggested that humans came to the area by sea and did not rely on hunting for subsistence.
(SFC, 6/25/99, p.A6)
8k BC Wine was produced in the region known as Colchis (later Georgia) as early as this time.
(Econ, 11/15/08, p.100)
8k BC The 15-foot, 3-toed Macrauchenia, a native of Patagonia, went extinct about this time. It had a body like a camel, a neck like a giraffe, and a flexible nose like an elephant’s trunk. Its fossil was discovered by Charles Darwin during his trip to the region (1833-1834).
(SFC, 4/2/10, p.C5)
8k BC About this time the inhabitants of Mesopotamia (centered about modern Iraq) began using distinctively shaped clay tokens- spheres, disks, cones, cylinders, triangles, among others- to keep track of foodstuffs, livestock, and land.
(I&I, Penzias, p.42)(V.D.-H.K.p.10)
8k BC Tel Sultan, an archaeological dig, indicated that Jericho was first settled about this time.
(AP, 10/1/10)
c8k BC - 7k BC In the early Mesolithic the climate warmed and settlers of the Paleolithic followed the deer north. Those who stayed mixed with the fisherman who moved from the west to form the ethnic groups of Baltic culture.
(DrEE, 10/12/96, p.2)(TB-Com, 10/11/00)
8k BC - 6.5k BC A few gigantic pine posts, possibly totem poles, were raised at Stonehenge during this period. New research in 2013 suggested that the ancient structures may perhaps have been raised to honor a sacred hunting ground.
(Live Science, 4/24/13)
8k BC - 1.5k BC This period is covered by Barry Cunliffe in his 2001 book: “Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples 8000BC - 1500 AD.
(Arch, 7/02, p.20)
c7.975k BC Humans lived in a cave near Oaxaca, Mexico, named Guila Naquitz (White Cliff). Scattered remains of tools, seeds and plants were found in 1966 by archeologist Kent Flannery and some of the seeds were dated to this time. The squash seeds showed signs of cultivation.
(SFC, 5/9/97, p.A2)
7.542k BC In 2008 Umeaa University said the world's oldest living tree on record, a spruce, took root about this time in central Sweden.
(AP, 4/17/08)
7.5k BC Pre-historic Indians inhabit areas of N. Cascades in Washington state at elevations of 6,600 ft. It appears that the local chert was used to fabricate stone tools.
(NG March 1990, Geographica)
7.5k BC The Illinois River Valley, where humans have lived since this time lost 5-10% of its archeological record in the great Mississippi flood of 1994 CE.
(NG, Geographica, Jan, 94)
c7.5k BC The Twin Dutch Site in Illinois is the location of the oldest house in the Midwest US.
(SFEC, 11/24/96, C17)
c7.5k BC A research team in 2004 uncovered a carefully buried cat on Cyprus, placed just inches from a human burial that also contained polished stones, shells, tools and jewelry. The graves were estimated to be 9,500 years old.
(AP, 4/9/04)
7.5k BC In 2001 Indian engineers began dredging operations in the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay) and pulled up human fossil bones, fossil wood, stone tools, pieces of pottery and many other things that indicated that a human habitation site dating to about this time.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_archaeology_in_the_Gulf_of_Cambay)
7.5k BC - 7k BC Evidence of human habitation has been found from this time at El Portal in Yosemite.
(SFEC, 5/18/97, Z1 p.4)
c7.4k BC In 1998 specimens of sandals were analyzed from a Missouri cave that dated to this time.
(SFC, 7/3/98, p.A2)
7.4k BC The mummy, known as the Spirit Cave Man, was found in Nevada in 1940, but in 1996 was dated to be more than 9,400 years old. The mummy was discovered by archeologists S.M. and Georgia Wheeler in a cave 13 miles east of Fallon. The mummy was wrapped in a skin robe and sewn into two mats woven of a marsh plant called tule.
(SFC, 4/27/96, p.A-5)
c7k BC Some American Indian graves in Newport Beach, CA., were believed to be this age.
(SFC, 3/10/97, p.A16)
7k BC An alteration in the Earth's magnetic field occurred.
(E&IH, 1973, p.94)
c7k BC A flute dating to this time was found in the 1980s in Jiahu. 6 flutes from the hollow wing bones of cranes were found in Zheng-zhou province from about this time.
(SFC, 9/23/99, p.A8)(SFC, 4/29/00, p.D4)
7k BC Scientists in 2004 found the earliest evidence of winemaking from pottery shards dating from 7,000BC in northern China.
(Reuters, 12/7/04)(SFC, 12/7/04, p.A1)
c7k BC Early Danish Mesolithic: In the Maglemose culture large amber pendants were hardly changed.
(PacDis, Winter/'97, p.8)
c7k BC The Ain Ghazal farming settlement in Jordan dated to this time. It was uncovered in 1974 during road construction near Amman.
(SSFC, 11/9/03, p.C7)
7k BC Archaeologists in 2022 discovered a stone age site dating to about this time in a remote desert in Jordan, with structures which show humans were rounding up and hunting gazelles much earlier than previously thought.
(Reuters, 2/23/22)
c7k BC Stone masks, dating to about this time, were later discovered in the Judean desert and hills near Jerusalem. In 2014 eleven stone masks were put on exhibit and offered a rare glimpse at some of civilization's first communal rituals.
(AP, 3/11/14)
7k BC In 2012 a group of Swedish marine archeologists said they have found what they believe could be the world's oldest stationary fishing traps on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, with the most ancient dating back about this time.
(AP, 6/5/12)
7k BC The site of Catalhoyuk in south-central Turkey was settled about this time and vanished after about 1,200 years. It marks the world’s first urban center.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.72)(SFC, 4/18/05, p.A6)
7k BC The first regular milking of animals was begun in the Sahara about this time.
(SFEC,11/2/97, Z1 p.6)
7k BC The Sami people began herding reindeer in northern Europe about this time as the last Ice Age ended. They were later considered to be Europe’s only indigenous people. By 2013 they numbered about 80,000 including 8,000 in Finland, 50,000 in Norway, 20,000 in Sweden and 2,000 in Russia.
(SFC, 8/30/13, p.A2)
c6.8k BC Jarmo in northern Iraq was later said to be the first town.
(SFEC, 7/16/00, Z1 p.2)
6.5k BC A skeleton of about this age was found in July, 1996, by the Columbia River in Kennewick, Wa. It became known as the "Kennewick Man" or "Richland Man." The 9,200 year old bones were later studied and determined to be most closely related to Asian people, particularly the Ainu of northern Japan. It was concluded in 2000 that he was an American Indian. The bones were dated to 7514-7324 BC. DNA testing in 2015 showed a close relationship to the Colville tribe in Washington state and dated him to about 6,500BC.
(SFC, 10/16/99, p.A11)(SFC, 1/14/00, p.A7)(SFC, 9/26/00, p.A5)(Econ, 7/16/05, p.76)(SFC, 6/19/15, p.A18)(Econ, 6/20/15, p.33)
6.38k BC Swedish archaeologists in 2020 reported finding the remains of a dog at a human burial site dating to about this time in southern Sweden. The dog was buried with a person near the town of Solvesborg.
(AP, 9/24/20)
6.2k BC The archeological record shows traces of domesticated cattle back to this time.
(Acad, Jul/Aug 1996)
6.2k BC In Germany the Adonis of Zschernitz, a male fertility figurine dating to this time, was excavated near Leipzig in 2003. In 2005 a female counterpart was found at the same site.
(SFC, 8/17/09, p.12)
6.2k BC The development of irrigation in Mesopotamia at this time seems to coincide with a cool dry period.
(Econ, 12/20/03, p.114)
6.2k BC The glacial lake Agassiz-Ojibway, body of water so vast that it covered parts of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, North Dakota, Ontario and Minnesota, massively drained, sending a flow of water into the Hudson Strait and the Labrador Sea. The sudden flood of fresh water diluted the saltiness of the Gulf Stream weakening its flow.
(Econ, 9/9/06, Survey p.6)(AFP, 2/24/08)
6k BC Carbon levels began to rise about this time and caused a deviation in the climatic patterns called the Milankovitch cycles. These cycles were regulated by the Earth's orbit and angle towards the sun.
(Econ, 12/20/03, p.115)
6k BC The Wappo Indians settle in the area northern California around Mt. Konocti 8,000 years ago. The eruption of Mt. Konocti millions of years earlier left a fissure in the earth through which ground water reaches the hot magma at 4,000 feet, and resurfaces as Indian Springs' three thermal geysers at 212 degrees. The water rises through old sea beds adding rich mineral and salt traces.
(Flyer on Indian Springs, 7/95)
c6k BC The Hokan Indians preceded the Miwoks in Northern California.
(SFEC, 10/4/98, p.B5)
c6k BC Remains of a probable human structure in Hells Gap, Wyoming, were dated to this time.
(SFC, 9/19/97, p.A3)
c6k BC A more advanced Neolithic people migrated to Europe from the Middle East bringing with them a new Y chromosome pattern and an agricultural way of life.
(SFC, 11/10/00, p.A7)
6k BC In 2010 Israeli archaeologists uncovered the remains of an 8,000-year-old prehistoric building as well as ancient flint tools in the modern city of Tel Aviv.
(AP, 1/11/10)
6k BC The site of Lepenski Vir on the Danube River at the Iron Gates gorges was occupied by people living in huts. Sculpted boulders at the site represent the first monumental art from central and eastern Europe.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.24)
c6k BC Bronze age settlements were established and later found in Moldova.
(SFC, 1/28/97, p.A5)
6k BC Ash from ancient campfires of this time were found in Muscat, Oman, in 1983.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.48)
c6k BC Lead beads were fashioned in Anatolia by craftsmen whose forced-air furnaces were able to reach 1,100 degrees, the melting point of galena, a common mineral of lead.
(NH, 7/96, p.50)
c6k BC The milodon, a giant sloth, became extinct in South America.
(SFEC, 11/24/96, T6)
6k BC Researchers in 2007 reported that evidence for the use of chili peppers date back to this time in Ecuador. Botanists if general agreed that chili peppers originated in Bolivia. Evidence for early use was also found in the Bahamas, Colombia, Panama, Peru and Venezuela.
(SFC, 2/16/07, p.A7)
6k BC In 2008 scientists reported that robust hunter-gathers, known as Kiffians, apparently abandoned the Gobero region of Niger during a long drought that dried up a lake about this time. The dried-up lake in the Sahara was found brimming with the skeletons of people, fish and crocodiles who thrived when the African desert was briefly green.
(Reuters, 8/15/08)
6k BC The last wooly rhino died about this time.
(Econ, 8/24/13, p.72)
6k BC In 2022 it was reported that mummification of the dead probably was more common in prehistory than previously known. A new discovery at hunter-gatherer burial sites in the Sado Valley in Portugal, dated to about this time, showed evidence for pre-burial treatments such as desiccation through mummification.
(Science Daily, 3/4/22)
6k BC - 5.5k BC In 2005 archaeologists in northern Greece uncovered traces of two prehistoric farming settlements dating back to this period.
(AP, 11/28/05)
6k BC - 4k BC The Pleistocene-Holocene date line, i.e. the 'end' of the glacial epoch, is perhaps best marked at the end of the last rapid rise in sea level between 6 & 8 thousand years ago.
(DD-EVTT, p.298)
5700BC In Oregon the 12,000 foot Mt. Mazama blew up and collapsed about this time. Its gaping crater filled rainfall and snowmelt creating what is now called Crater Lake.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Mazama)(SSFC, 5/27/18, p.M6)
c5.6k BC The Mediterranean Sea, swollen be melted glaciers, breached a natural dam that separated it from the fresh water lake later known as the Black Sea. Sea water from the Mediterranean poured in for as long as 2 years. An ancient coastline with this date was verified in 1999. [see 2348BC]
(SFC, 9/28/99, p.A14)(SFC, 11/18/99, p.C6)(SFC, 9/13/00, p.A7)
5.5k BC Hahnhofersand Man was dated in 2001 to about this time by Oxford University’s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. German Prof. Reiner Protsch von Zieten had earlier dated the fossils to about 34,300BC. In the 1980s the Hahnhofersand fossils were said to have both Neanderthal and human characteristics.
(Arch, 5/05, p.15)
5.5k BC Scientists in 2012 presented evidence of cheese making in pottery sieves discovered in Poland that dated to about this time.
(SSFC, 12/16/12, p.A22)
5.5k BC People sweeping out from Turkey colonized Europe, likely as a part of the agricultural revolution, reaching Germany about 7,500 years ago.
(Live Science, 4/23/13)
5.5k BC - 4k BC In Japan the Sannai Maruyama site in northern Honshu uncovered postholes of houses and longhouses, graves, figurines and animal remains of the early to middle Jomon period.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.72)
5.4k BC - 5k BC Archeologists have determined that wine was made in villages in Iran's remote Zagros Mountains about this time. Wine jars were dug up near the ruined village called Hajii Firuz Tepe and analyzed to have contained a retsina type of wine.
(SFC, 6/6/96, p.A3)(Reuters, 12/7/04)
5.2k BC - 4.5k BC In 2008 Egypt’s supreme council of antiquities said a team of US archaeologists had discovered the ruins of a city dating back to this period of the first farmers in the Fayyum oasis.
(AFP, 1/29/08)
c5.1k BC A slate plaque from pre-dynastic Egypt was carved with scenes of battlefield carnage on one side and leaf munching antelope on the other. It was part of an exhibit at the Guggenheim.
(NYT, 6/7/96, p.B9)
c5.1k BC In 2001 evidence in Mexico was reported for corn cultivation from sediments of this time.
(SFC, 5/18/01, p.A7)
5k BC War had become endemic in almost all human societies.
(V.D.-H.K.p.408)
5k BC In 2015 scientists reported evidence of a massacre near Frankfurt, Germany, dating to about this time. Skeletal remains in a mass grave of some 26 men, women and children indicated blunt-force marks to the head, arrow wounds smashed shins.
(SFC, 8/18/15, p.A2)
5k BC Since the last glacial phase, an interglacial had been in effect, beginning about this time.
(DD-EVTT, p.301)
5k BC The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act gives large portions of prime bear habitat to the Alutiiq people, who have hunted and fished on the island for 7,000 years.
(NG, Jan. 94, p.141)
5k BC Native people were traveling through the Barrens, northwest of Canada's Hudson's Bay,
(NH, 5/96, p.35)
5kBC The Chinchorro, hunter-gatherers in Chile’s Atacama Desert, began mummifying their dead about this time.
(SFC, 8/15/12, p.A7)
c5k BC A complex of slabs and stones in southern Egypt that may date this far back was found during field work that ended in 1997. The site included 10 slabs, some 9 feet tall, 30 rock-lined ovals, 9 burial sites for cows, and a "calendar circle" of stones. They were thought to have been constructed by cattle-herders and used for astronomical observations.
(SFC, 4/2/98, p.A6)
5k BC In 2008 archeologists reported the discovery of a farming village in Egypt’s Faiyum Oasis, 50 miles south of Cairo, that dated to about this time. Residents grew wheat and barley, and raised sheep, goats and pigs.
(SFC, 2/13/08, p.A11)
5k BC In 2018 Egypt's Antiquities Ministry said a Neolithic site has been discovered in Tell el-Samara, about 140 km (87 miles) north of Cairo. A team found silos containing animal bones and food, indicating human habitation as early as 5,000 BC.
(AP, 9/2/18)
5k BC An international team of researchers in 2019 said they have discovered a 7,000-year-old-seawall along Israel's Mediterranean coast, providing evidence that coastal communities protected themselves against rising waters even in ancient times. The seawall, found about 120 meters (130 yards) off the coast, is the only structure of its kind found in Israel's coastal region. The Neolithic era village, called Tel Hreiz, was abandoned and eventually swallowed by the sea.
(AP, 12/19/19)
5k BC Dried-up riverbeds as well as cave paintings indicate that at this time the Sahara was a land of flowing rivers, lush green pastures, and forests.
(ATC, p.108)
5k BC Stone age farmers and fisherman inhabited the area around Byblos, Lebanon. Archeologists at Byblos found at least 12 layers of civilizations that dated back 7,000 years.
(NG, Aug., 1974, p.154)(SFEC, 4/13/97, p.T9)
5k BC Shell and fishbone middens indicated a fishing village of this time at Ras al Hamra in Qurum, Oman.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.48)
5k BC On Malta the Ghar Dalam cave near the harbor of Marsaxlokk revealed bones of domesticated animals and potsherds.
(AM, Jul/Aug '97 p.42)
c5k BC Research in 2003 indicated that bananas and taro were cultivated in the highlands of Papua New Guinea as long as 7,000 years ago. The first signs of human habitation in the area occurred c5,800BC and included a change from forest to grasslands and increase in charcoal in the sediments. The earliest Asian influence on the islands occurred about 1,500BC.
(AP, 6/19/03)
5k BC The Thracian village of Nebet Tepe, later Plovdiv, Bulgaria, dated to about this time. It was redeveloped by the Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Bulgars and Turks.
(SSFC, 7/16/06, p.G4)
5k BC The human population was about 5 million at this time.
(SFEC, 9/19/99, Z1 p.3)
5k BC - 3.5k BC The predynastic period of Egypt.
(R4,1998)
5k BC - 3k BC Pinto Man, a Native American nomad, left arrow points in the desert basin near Twenty-Nine Palms in Southern California.
(Sp., 5/96, p.64)
5k BC - 2.5k BC Scientists in 2008 said a second group settled the Gobero region of Niger during this period. These were Tenerians, smaller, shorter people who hunted, herded and fished.
(Reuters, 8/15/08)
4.8k BC - 4.6k BC More than 150 large temples, constructed between during this period, were unearthed in fields and cities in Germany, Austria and Slovakia in 2002-2005. A village at Aythra, near Leipzig in eastern Germany, was home to some 300 people living in up to 20 large buildings around the temple.
(AP, 6/12/05)
4.713k BC The most recent time that the three major chronological cycles (28 year solar, 19 year lunar, and 15 year Roman Indication) began on the same day as determined by Joseph Scaliger in 1582.
(CFA, '96,Vol 179, p.23)
4.5k BC In 2014 San Francisco construction workers discovered human remains at the site of the new Transbay Transit Center that dated to about this time.
(SFC, 10/21/14, p.D1)
4.5k BC A human skeleton of a man at least 50-years-old, dating to about this time, was excavated in southern Iraq around 1930 and taken to the Univ. of Pennsylvania’s Pen Museum, where it was lost in storage until 2014.
(SFC, 8/6/14, p.A5)
4.5k BC Neolithic burial mounds dating to this time were later discovered at Carnac, northwest France.
(Arch, 5/05, p.32)
4.5k BC Northern Oman has a ceramic tradition back to this time.
(AM, May/Jun 97 p.52)
4.5k BC Horses were first domesticated in what is now the Ukraine. Hunters who ate them wild found that they could milk them tamed and ride them.
(SFC, 6/9/96, Zone 1 p.2)
4.5k BC - 4.2k BC The Skorba phase on Malta was marked by a growing population, with increased forest clearance for agriculture and grazing that may have led to erosion. Obsidian on Malta from the islands of Lipari and Panteleria indicate links to the outside world.
(AM, Jul/Aug '97 p.40)
4.5k BC-3.5k BC The Galgal Refaim, or the "wheel of ghosts," first noticed by scholars in 1968, was built during this period. It consists of four circles, the outermost more than 500 feet across, made up of an estimated 42,000 tons of basalt stone, the remains of massive walls that experts believe once rose as much as high as 30 feet. The enormous feat of construction was carried out by a society about which little is known. Scholars tended to agree that a tomb in the center of the site was added a millennia or two after the circles were erected in the Chalcolithic period. In 2011 a scholar suggested that Galgal Refaim was an excarnation facility.
(AP, 11/3/11)
4.5k BC - 2k BC A sacrificial dump in Guanghan, Sichuan Province, in China was uncovered in 1976. Large quantities of elephants tusks reveal that elephants roamed the area. Human figures, monster masks, and tree fragments made of bronze tubes were also found.
(WSJ, 9/27/96, p.A16)
4.431k BC Timbers of a possible ship of this time were found off Hayling Island near Portsmouth, England, in 1997. The structure might also have been a causeway.
(AM, Jul/Aug '97 p.13)
4.2k BC - 3.8k BC On Malta the Zebbug phase indicated evidence of collective burials.
(AM, Jul/Aug '97 p.40)
4.241k BC The Egyptian calendar was established.
(WSJ, 1/5/05, p.B1)
4.05k BC Agriculture arrived fully formed in Kent, England, about this time.
(Econ, 6/11/11, p.82)
4.004k BC Oct 23, According to 17th century divine James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, and Dr. John Lightfoot of Cambridge, the world was created on this day, a Sunday, at 9 a.m. "If you grew up with the King James edition of the Bible that I did, you learned that the world was created in 4004 BC."
(NG, Nov. 1985, edit. p.559)(HN, 10/23/98)
4k BC In 2011 it was reported that the earliest known winery, dating to about this time, had been discovered in Armenia.
(SFC, 1/11/11, p.A2)
4k BC People in China’s Yellow River Valley switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture about this time.
(SFC, 3/4/02, p.A3)
4k BC The Chinese began working with silkworms about this time. They built their first silk machine about 2,000 BC.
(Econ, 9/12/15, SR p.15)
c4k BC Apples (Malus Sieversii) similar to modern day varieties began to appear around Almaty, Kazakhstan. These ultimately produced the Red Delicious and Golden Delicious in America. The Red Delicious was hybridized into the Fuji and the Empire. The Golden Delicious was hybridized into the Gala, the Jonagold, the Mutsu, Pink Lady and Elstar.
(WSJ, 7/3/03, p.A1)
4k BC Artifacts dating to about this time, later held in Kosovo, were believed to belong to the Vinca, a prehistoric culture in southern Europe.
(AP, 2/22/13)
4k BC The Hittites settled around Cappadocia in present day Turkey.
(Smith., 5/95, p.25)
4k BC Skilled goldsmiths [proto-Thracians] lived in the area of Varna, now in Bulgaria, on the Black Sea.
(SFEC, 2/1/98, p.T3)(SFEC, 8/2/98, DB p.22)
4k BC Stone tablets show cheese as early as this time.
(HFA, '96, p.121)
4k BC Evidence of tuberculosis was found in a Neolithic burial ground near Heidelberg, where the skeleton of a young man showed fusion of the fourth and fifth dorsal vertebrae.
(WP, 1951, p.5)
4k BC Circumcision was part of religious rites in Egypt and Greece dating back to this time.
(SFC, 5/19/96, p.A-10)
c4k BC In Malta the Hypogeum, a complex of rock-cut chamber tombs, dated to this time. They were discovered in 1902.
(SFEC, 9/17/00, p.T3)
4k BC The Orkney Islands were inhabited at least since this time.
(SFEM, 10/10/99, p.23)
c4k BC In Poland the archeological site at Oslonki uncovered some 30 longhouses and 80 graves.
(AM, Mar/Apr 97 p.73)
4k BC Chiefdoms of northern Europe were trading in amber.
(PacDis, Winter/'97, p.10)
4k BC The comet Hale-Bopp visited the inner solar system about this time. It next appeared in 1997.
(SFC, 3/28/97, p.A2)
c4k BC The Pistol Star, located between the Earth and center of the Milky Way, was first seen with infrared equipment in the early 1990s. It was measured to be 25,000 light-years away with a radius of 93-140 million miles. It was estimated to have formed 1-3 million years ago and shed much of its mass in violent eruptions estimated to have occurred about 6,000 years ago.
(USAT, 10/8/97, p.3A)
4k BC The oldest artifacts of the Mesopotamian city of Ur dated to about this time.
(ON, 8/20/11, p.9)
c4k BC The last wooly mammoths, Mammuthus primigenius, went extinct on Wrangel Island, north of the Arctic Circle.
(NH, 12/98, p.78)
4k BC - 3k BC The Indo-European language group divided into different branches.
(DrEE, 9/21/96, p.1)
4k BC - 2.5k BC A rock painting from this time in Tassili n'Ajjer, southeastern Algeria, illustrates a battle between 2 prehistoric groups armed with bows and arrows.
(NH, Jul, p.29)
4k BC - 1.5k BC Southern Britain was settled by emigrants from what is now the Netherlands and the French province of Brittany. They started farming, herding and burying their dead and are called the "beaker people" after a distinctive drinking vessel found in chambered mounds called "barrows." It is speculated that these people and their descendants began worshiping inside "henges," circular areas enclosed by big ditches and small banks of dirt. Four phases of development at Stonehenge in the Salisbury plain have been defined.
(HT, 3/97, p.20,22)
3.8k BC The Supe people, a maritime farming community, was established about this time along the coast of Peru.
(SFC, 1/20/09, p.A13)
3.8k BC - 3.7k BC In 2010 archeologists in Israel uncovered two fragments of a clay tablet with writing that resembled portions of the Code of Hammurabi of the 18th century BC. The fragments referred to issues of personal injury law relating to slaves and masters.
(SFC, 7/27/10, p.A2)
3.8k BC - 3.2k BC In Ireland at Poulnabrone Dolmen in County Clare, one of some 120 wedge tombs, bodies were interred over a 600 year period that ended about 3200BC.
(SFEC, 11/12/00, p.T8)
3.6k BC - 1k BC The Mesopotamian settlement of Nagar (in northeastern Syria) grew to become one of the first large cities of the Middle East. It began before 6,000BC and continued to about 1000BC.
(MT, summer 2003, p.11)
c3.761k BC The first year of the Jewish calendar that begins with Rosh Hashana. [1997 was year 5758]
(SFC, 10/1/97, p.A16)(WUD, 1994, p.767)
3.652k BC Archeologists found ears of popcorn 5,600 years old in the Bat Cave in New Mexico in 1948.
(HFA, '96, p.66)
3.627k BC - 3.377k BC In Armenia a leather shoe dating to this period was found in 2010 in a pit outside a cave.
(AP, 6/10/10)
3.6k BC In 2005 a team working for five years in the area of Kom El-Ahmar, Egypt, known in antiquity as Hierakonpolis, excavated a complex thought to belong to a ruler of the ancient city who reigned around this time. Archaeologists unearthed seven corpses believed to date to the era, as well as an intact figure of a cow's head carved from flint.
(AP, 4/22/05)
3.6k BC In Washington state the Osceola mudflow from Mount Ranier covered an area from Rainier to Puget Sound.
(SFEC, 7/12/98, p.A22)
3.6k BC The Supe people, a maritime farming community along the coast of Peru, disappeared about this time. In 2009 researchers found their disappearance coincided with earthquakes and landslides followed by massive flooding.
(SFC, 1/20/09, p.A13)
3.6k BC In 2012 South Korean archaeologist Cho Mi-soon said that the nation’s archeological agency has found the remains of a farming field from the Neolithic period on South Korea's east coast and that the site may date to about this time.
(AP, 6/27/12)
3.6k BC - 3.5k BC An Egyptian cemetery of working class inhabitants at Hierankopolis of this time showed evidence of mummification.
(AM, 9/01, p.13)
3.6k BC - 3k BC On Malta the Gantija phase saw the construction of the first megalithic temples.
(AM, Jul/Aug '97 p.43)
3.6k BC - 1.7k BC Neolithic jade pieces represent some of the oldest of Chinese art.
(WSJ, 2/19/98, p.A20)
3.5k BC Sumerians and Babylonians use a sexigesimal (base 60) number system according to historian Eric Temple Bell.
(V.D.-H.K.p.27)
3.5k BC King Etena of Babylonia was pictured on a coin, flying on an eagle’s back.
(NPub, 2002, p.2)
3.5k BC A linen shroud dating to this time was later put on display at the Egyptian museum in Turin, Italy.
(SSFC, 1/22/06, p.E6)
3.5k BC Farmers began to settle the lower slopes of the Tibetan plateau with millet as the dominant crop.
(Econ, 11/22/14, p.75)
3.5k BC - 3.1k BC In Egypt the "Knife of Gebel-el-Arak" was made with an ivory handle carved with hunting and battle scenes. It is now in the French Louvre.
(WSJ, 1/29/98, p.A16)
3.5k BC - 3k BC In 2008 a team of German and Peruvian archaeologists reported the discovery of a ceremonial plaza near Peru's north-central coast dating to this period.
(AP, 2/27/08)
3.5k BC - 2.4k BC The Tower of Babel was built during this period by people of one language who inhabited the land of Shinar in the kingdom of Nimrod.
(Econ, 4/26/08, p.108)
3.45k BC The first cities appeared along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates just north of what is now the Persian Gulf. The cities made up the Uruk culture named after the principal city of Uruk, which corresponds to the Biblical Erech. The culture invented writing, the lunar calendar, used metal and built monumental architecture. The cities remained independent for almost a thousand years.
(eawc, p.1)
3.4k BC According to Rakhine legend their first recorded kingdom arose, centered around the northern town of Dhanyawadi, in the 34th century BCE and lasted until 327 CE.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rakhine_State)
3.309k BC Mar 10, A primordial Maya god, named GI by scholars, began his mythical reign.
(AM, Jul-Aug/99, p.16)
Go to 3300-1300BC
