The Saalian glaciation
The penultimate glacial builds ice sheets nearly as large as the last one.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 61 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 5 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
MIS 6, from about 191,000 to 130,000 years ago — the Saalian in Europe, the Illinoian in North America — is a long, severe glacial with ice sheets approaching their maximum Quaternary extent. It is the world in which Neanderthals become fully cold-adapted and in which early Homo sapiens populations in Africa are pushed into fragmented refugia by the accompanying aridity. Genetic bottlenecks in several species date to this interval.