Pleistocene Ice Age
2.58 million – 11,700 years ago: mammoths, sabre-tooths and cave bears
The Pleistocene epoch lasted from about 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago. It was a time of repeated glaciations: ice sheets advanced and retreated dozens of times, and during the coldest phases sea levels dropped by more than 100 metres, joining Siberia to Alaska and Britain to mainland Europe.
Across the cold, grassy mammoth steppe and the forests further south lived the megafauna: woolly mammoths and rhinos, cave lions and cave bears, giant deer with antlers spanning over three metres, and in the Americas sabre-toothed cats, dire wolves, glyptodonts and ground sloths the size of elephants. Our own species shared this world with them and hunted many of them.
Most of these animals disappeared between about 50,000 and 10,000 years ago. Scientists still debate how much of that was caused by climate change and how much by human hunting; for most regions the answer seems to be a combination of both.
