Neozoic Age

Neozoic Age

Giancarlo Varnier

Copyright: 2012 Ed Alvis

Published by Editions ALVIS at Smashwords

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INDEX

Introduction

PLEISTOCENE

Homo Habilis

Homo Rudolfensis

The Paranthropus

Homo Ergaster

Homo Erectus

Homo Antecessor

Homo Heidelbergensis

Homo Neanderthalensis

Homo Sapiens

HOLOCENE

The Paleolithic

The Mesolithic

The Neolithic

The Copper Age

The Bronze Age

The Iron Age

Bibliography

Introduction

The Neozoic or Quaternary Era owes its name to the emergence and spread of man and comes from the greek new life should be from 1.8 million years ago until today. After the first hominids appeared about four million years ago in the eastern equatorial Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya), two million years ago, Homo habilis appeared (man who knows how to use his hands). The first remains of Homo habilis were discovered by Louis Leakey (1903-1972) in 1960 in Olduvai Gorge, near Lake Victoria (Tanzania), followed by subsequent discoveries on the shores of Lake Turkana (Kenya) and its tributary. In this book we will explore the trails along the path leading to Homo sapiens, we will see what have been, until now, the most important scientific discoveries about the origin of our species and related issues.

Geologically, we will see how the formations of this age are represented in all the land. In this era, in fact, prevail moraine deposits, alluvial sediments, travertine and peat bogs. Volcanic activity was remarkable in several areas and completed the lifting of the mountain ranges already formed, but what characterized this period were the most violent and frequent climatic changes that gave rise to very long periods of glaciation with an impact, often devastating, of many living species. The Neozoic is divided into two epochs: Pleistocene and Holocene, the latter still ongoing and cover a period of 1.800.000 years ago to the present.

PLEISTOCENE

The name of the Pleistocene, or also known as Ice Age flood, comes from the greek the latest. Ranges from 1.8 million years ago up to eleven thousand years ago. The International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) does not recognize, however, the Neozoic as geological era in its own right and considers the Pleistocene period of the Cenozoic, dividing it into Pleistocene or Calabrian (from 1,800,000 to 781,000 years ago), Middle Pleistocene or Ionian ( from 781,000 to 126,000 years ago) and Late Pleistocene or Tarantian (from 126,000 to 11,000 years ago). During the Pleistocene moraines formed significant due to the movement of glaciers, alluvial and aeolian deposits, called loess or loess, which in some cases less than 400 feet thick. During interglacial fact the wind carrying fine dust that, in steppe regions devoid of forests such as in China, in the basin of the Yellow River, it compact. Nowadays, the erosion of the water in the valley is at the origin of the yellow color of the river and the sea where it leads. In some rocks are not subject to erosion of the water, the porous structure is due to the submerged stems of herbs. The climate was characterized by intermittent decrease of temperature, which caused significant changes especially in the northern hemisphere. The glaciers came to cover one third of the continents and pushed almost to the 39th parallel in North America (to the south of New York) and 52 ° in Europe (Berlin, Germany and the Netherlands), leaving traces in parts of the Alps and foothills of the Alps, where they dug for example, Lake Maggiore, Lake Como, Lake Iseo and Lake Garda, just to mention the most extensive. In recent times it has been discovered that by measuring the ratio of two isotopes of 'oxygen in the ice you can get an estimate of the volume of the ice and therefore of the temperature. The main result was to be able to establish a chronology of glaciation in the Antarctic ice core samples of the making. The more these cores are deeper and you go back in time: today you have a history of ice ages dating back some 2 million years ago. It was thus able to establish that the glacial expansions of Neozoic that affected Europe have been five, alternating with four long intervals during which glaciers diminished in volume. They take their name from the Danube River and its tributaries. The glaciations of Neozoic are listed below according to their usual names and relative time period:

Danube: from 1,500,000 to 1,000,000 years

Günz: 680,000 to 620,000

Mindel: 455,000 to 300,000

Riss: 193,000 to 121,000

Würm: 108,000 to 10,000.

Result of repeated glaciations was the lowering of the mean sea level, which surpassed even the 110 meters. During interglacial stages, however, were formed massive floods that carrying avalanche of debris, formed alluvial deposits can fill large bays, such as the one that once flooded the plains. In glacial periods this came to lie down until the present city of Ancona. The melting of the glaciers of the Pleistocene period, until it reached its present size, caused the rise in sea level of about one meter per century, unless rapid jumps when it came to 2.5 meters every hundred years. The total lift was over 120 meters, and isolated animal species on land where they could follow developments in autonomous and specialized for that environment. It is possible that both the tradition of the deluge myth, then taken up by Plato in the Timaeus of submerging of a great civilization at the dawn of history, is to be connected to rising seas at the end of the Würm glaciation, which engulfed the first protohistoric civilization. Since the end of the last ice age the sea level has risen by an average of 1 cm per year. The causes of this periodic advance and retreat of the ice are still largely mysterious, but the best hypothesis linking them to periodic variations of solar energy that heats our planet, with the most acute phases every 100,000 years. This theory was formulated at the turn of the First World War by climatologist Milutin Milankovic of Serbia (1879-1958) who, studying the Earth's orbit with the help of primitive calculation, noted as variations in solar radiation produced by the motion of the Earth to latitudes of the Arctic Circle appear synchronized with major glaciations. Climate-related disasters are in fact such that the cycle of 100,000 years is not symmetrical, but the descent to the minimum temperature (and therefore the maximum of the last ice age) is much slower than heating in practice it takes about 80,000 years to cool the climate and 20,000 years to warm up. It is also able to establish that, in addition to the main loop of 100,000, years there are secondary cycles with periods of about 20,000 years and 40,000 years: these periods coincide with those characteristic of the variations of some orbital parameters of the Earth. The theory of Milankovic but does not withstand closer analysis of the ice cores made using the method of radioactive isotopes. In fact, the ice ages occur simultaneously in the two terrestrial hemispheres, as if the insolation in the Northern Hemisphere was also the cause of glaciation in the southern hemisphere, and still lacks a plausible explanation of this strange contemporaneity. Not only that, while in the last million years the dominant periods of glaciation are those with 20,000 and 40,000 years ago, the first term disappears in a million years earlier. In the absence of plausible explanations studies have focused on other sides, such as the fact that in phase with the glaciations vary the concentrations in the atmosphere of certain greenhouse gases such as methane and carbon dioxide. The results of a recent study due to a group of German researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institut, however, seem to indicate that the observed changes in ice volume in the Antarctic almost exclusively affected the local climate, i.e. seasonal cycles in the snow. This means that the temperature record (or ice volume), which was first interpreted as a response to the South Pole to the stresses of solar radiation received in the northern hemisphere, in fact it's just a local phenomenon. In any case, a complete theory to interpret accurately the cycle of ice ages and that allows us to predict the arrival of the next, unfortunately, does not yet exist. The dwarf birch, characteristic of the tundra, he managed to establish itself in Central Europe. In northern Europe prospered Rhododendron ponticum, who currently lives also in subtropical regions. Even the alpine flora, as a result of glaciation over the millennia has had a lively dynamism. It has often been extinct from the mountains of origin to find the most suitable habitat in regions near the sea, or has been enriched by new species that have been forced to migrate in front of the relentless ice and were welcomed by our Alps in particular microclimates, in oasis separate from the remaining boreal regions. A representative of the circumpolar flora forced to migrate is the Linnaea borealis, dedicated to the great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus in addition to the Arctic lands where the term originates. This delicate caprifogliacea, very common in the far north, has reached its limits with small settlements in southern pine forests of the Val di Cogne and Valsavarenche. Other evidence of glacial migration, much less common than the Linnaea, is the mythical Leontopodium alpinum, the Stella Alpina, spontaneous in Mongolia and the Himalayas. By the way remember that it was the doctor and naturalist Konrad von Gesner (1516-1565), who first observed as the vegetation is influenced by the climate. During interglacial developed gigantic birds with atrophied wings, like the Moa, whose fossil remains have been found in New Zealand, and Aepyornis maximus, lived in Madagascar, both islands long remained isolated from any other continent, which allowed them to develop their own fauna. The Aepyornis reached a height of about 3 meters, but exceeded them coming Moa 4 meters, the latter had a skeleton strong, powerful legs, relatively small skull, beak short and flat of different shapes, they laid eggs 30 cm long and heavy the beauty of 7 pounds. Some examples of these birds came up to the seventeenth century, but were exterminated by the first European navigators that opened the routes of the Indian Ocean. It is in this period of cold weather that appeared the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, bison, cave bear, hyena, reindeer, roe deer and ibex. The Mammoth in particular was one of the most typical representatives of the Pleistocene fauna: it was a snouted more than four meters high at the shoulder and, unlike current elephant was covered with thick fur and was equipped with a short skull and flattened posteriorly. The tusks, huge, could be more than four and a half meters long, and the end was curved, and some had even crossed the old men among them. Were common in all the northern continents: the Mammuthus Columbi such as was common in Florida, Georgia and Louisiana, lands that we usually do not associate with mammoth, having now a very hot climate, and there was even a kind of dwarf mammoths in Sardinia (Mammuthus lamarmorae). The Mammuthus Columbi was sparsely covered with hair after considering the latitudes where he lived, but the same cannot be said for the Mammuthus trogontherii, a resident of the Eurasian steppe grasslands. The latter was high up to four feet and a half, even though the biggest of all time remains the snouted Paleoloxodon antiquus or elephant in the forest, with more than five meters at the withers was bigger than even the mammoths. Of these colossal mammals because we know very well the skeletons in Siberia have been also found specimens frozen, so it was possible to study the skin and soft tissues. Among other things, according to the etymological dictionary online, Mammut derived from the word Russian word mamout, in turn borrowed from Tungus mother (ground), since the mummies of these animals were found under the ground, and in the east Siberian this circumstance gave rise to the legend that mammoths once lived under the