The last glacial period begins
The Eemian ends, ice starts building, and the world enters the cold in which our species does nearly everything.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 103 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 3 thousand years
- Era
- Late Pleistocene, Quaternary
Around 115,000 years ago summer insolation at high northern latitudes falls, snow begins persisting through summers in Canada and Scandinavia, and the last glacial period starts. It runs for over a hundred thousand years and contains almost the entire archaeological record of behaviourally modern humans: the migrations out of Africa, the settlement of Australia and the Americas, cave art, and the extinction of every other human species all happen inside it.