Climate stage· The columns of time
MIS 8
300 ka → 243 ka
A cold stage of fifty-seven millennia, during which the species exists but leaves few traces anyone has yet found.
What the evidence shows
The value of these 57 millennia is that they are almost empty. Between the oldest known fossils and the first well documented occupations lies a long stretch in which the archaeological record thins out, and the thinning is a fact about excavation as much as about the past. Cold stages lower sea level, so the coastlines of the time, and whatever people did on them, now lie tens of metres under water. Much of the missing evidence is not missing: it is submerged.
Bounds and conventions
An empty band on a timeline is ambiguous by nature: it can mean that little happened, or that little has survived, or that little has been looked for. Here the last two carry most of the weight, and the frieze cannot tell them apart.
A glacial stage.