The Conclusion of the Quaternary Extinction Event (c. 8th Millennium BCE)

The Quaternary extinction event, which began in the mid-Pleistocene, reached its final phase by the start of the 8th millennium BCE. By this time, many of the iconic Ice Age megafauna had disappeared, fundamentally reshaping ecosystems across the globe.

Major Megafaunal Losses

Among the most significant species lost during this period were:

• Megatherium – The giant ground sloths of the Americas, once towering over human hunters.
• Woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) – Adapted for Ice Age steppe-tundra, but unable to survive post-glacial warming.
• Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus) – Famous for its massive antlers, which may have been a factor in its extinction.
• Cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) – A large Ice Age omnivore, extinct by 27,000 years BP, foreshadowing later megafaunal extinctions.
• Cave lion (Panthera spelaea) – One of the largest predatory cats of prehistoric Europe and Asia.
• Saber-toothed cats (Smilodon and Homotherium) – Iconic apex predators that disappeared with declining megafaunal prey.

The Extinction of the Mammoth and Equids

• Mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) vanished from Eurasia and North America around this time.
• However, isolated populations on Wrangel Island (Arctic Ocean) survived until around 1650 BCE, among the last remnants of the Ice Age giants.
• Equidae (horses and related species) disappeared entirely from North America, where they had evolved.
• While horses, donkeys, and zebras persisted in Africa and Eurasia, wild horses in the Americas vanished, only to be reintroduced by humans in the 16th century CE.

Causes of the Final Extinctions

The final wave of Quaternary extinctions is attributed to two primary factors:

1. Climate Change

   • The end of the Ice Age caused habitat shifts, reducing grazing lands for megafauna.
   • Rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns disrupted ecosystems that large herbivores depended on.

2. Human Expansion and Overhunting

   • Advanced human hunting techniques (e.g., mass kills, fire-driven hunts, and spears with stone points) increased predation pressure.
   • Human presence often correlated with the disappearance of large prey species, particularly in North and South America.

The Legacy of the Quaternary Extinction

• This massive loss of megafauna reshaped global ecosystems, leaving many regions without their largest herbivores and predators.
• It marked a critical turning point in Earth's biological history, influencing later human societies, as they shifted from big-game hunting toward domesticated animals and agriculture in the Holocene.
• Some species that disappeared in the wild, like the horse, would later be reintroduced and domesticated, altering human civilization forever.

The Quaternary extinction event was one of the most profound biological transitions in prehistory, signaling the end of the Pleistocene megafaunal era and the beginning of the human-dominated Holocene epoch.

The earliest traces of human occupation in Norway are found along the coast, where the huge ice shelf of the last ice age first melts between 11,000 and 8,000 BCE.

The oldest finds are stone tools dating from 9,500 to 6,000 BCE, discovered in Finnmark (Komsa culture) in the north and Rogaland (Fosna culture) in the south-west.

However, theories about two altogether different cultures (the Komsa culture north of the Arctic Circle being one and the Fosna culture from Trøndelag to Oslofjord being the other) will be rendered obsolete in the 1970s.

More recent finds along the entire coast have revealed to archaeologists that the difference between the two can simply be ascribed to different types of tools and not to different cultures.

Coastal fauna provide a means of livelihood for fishermen and hunters, who may have made their way along the southern coast about 10,000 BCE, when the interior is still covered with ice.

It is now thought that these so-called "Arctic" peoples came from the south and followed the coast northward considerably later.

Forceful rivers of meltwater start to flow and shape the virgin lands as the climate warms, and more stable flora and fauna gradually begin emerging in Scandinavia, and Denmark in particular.

The first human settlers to inhabit Denmark and Scandinavia permanently are the Maglemosian people, residing in seasonal camps and exploiting the land, sea, rivers and lakes.

The Weichsel glaciation covers all of Denmark most of the time, except the western coasts of Jutland.

It ends around 11,100 BCE, allowing humans to move back into the previously ice-covered territories and establish permanent habitation.

During the first post-glacial millennia, the landscape gradually changes from tundra to light forest, and varied fauna including now-extinct megafauna appear.

Gobekli Tepe (Turkish for "Potbelly hill"), a site six miles from the site of Urfa featuring massive carved stones, may be the world’s oldest temple, erected by hunter-gatherers on the highest point of an elongated mountain ridge some fifteen kilometers northeast of the town of Sanliurfa (formerly Urfa/Edessa) in southeastern Turkey.

Construction begins in the tenth millennium BCE (around 11,500 years ago), before the advent of sedentism.

Together with Nevali Çori, the site, currently undergoing excavation by German and Turkish archaeologists, has revolutionized understanding of the Eurasian Neolithic.

Göbekli Tepe is the oldest human-made place of worship yet discovered.

At the main excavation site, standing stones are arranged in circles; on the hillside beyond are four other rings of pillars, only partially excavated.

In the center are two large, T-shaped pillars surrounded by slightly smaller stones facing The monoliths are decorated with carved reliefs of animals and of abstract pictograms.

The pictograms may represent commonly understood sacred symbols, as known from Neolithic cave paintings elsewhere.

Erected around 9000 BCE, the tallest pillars are sixteen feet high and weigh between seven and ten tons.

Some are elaborately carved; their broad faces featuring foxes, lions, snakes, boars, and scorpions.

The carefully carved figurative reliefs depict lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles, asses, snakes and other reptiles, insects, arachnids, and birds, particularly vultures and waterfowl.

Vultures also feature in the iconography of the Neolithic sites of Çatalhöyük and Jericho; it is believed that in the early Neolithic culture of Anatolia and the Near East the deceased were deliberately exposed in order to be excarnated by vultures and other birds of prey. (The head of the deceased was sometimes removed and preserved—possibly a sign of ancestor worship.)

At the time the shrine was constructed the surrounding country was much more lush and capable of sustaining this variety of wildlife, before millennia of settlement and cultivation resulted in the near–Dust Bowl conditions prevailing today.

Archaeologists, led by German Klaus Schmidt, have found abundant remains of wild game here —gazelles, boars, sheep, and red deer, together with vultures, cranes, ducks, and geese—suggesting that those who frequented the site had not yet domesticated animals or farmed.

Moreover, there are none of the telltale signs of settlement for contemporaneous sites in the region, such as cooking hearths, houses, trash pits, or the clay fertility figurines so ubiquitous elsewhere, indicating the site’s function as solely a religious center.

To carve, erect, and bury rings of multi-ton stones would have required hundreds of workers, all needing to be fed and housed.

Schmidt has theorized that the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the foundation for the development of complex society.

Indeed, at a prehistoric village site only twenty miles away, geneticists have found evidence of the world’s oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates that agriculture developed there about 8500 BCE, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepe‘s construction.

Few humanoid forms have surfaced at Göbekli Tepe, but include a relief of a naked woman, posed frontally in a crouched position, that Schmidt likens to the Venus accueillante figures found in Neolithic north Africa; and of at least one decapitated corpse surrounded by vultures.

Some of the pillars, namely the T-shaped ones, have carved arms, which may indicate that they represent stylized humans (or anthropomorphic gods).

Another example is decorated with human hands in what could be interpreted as a prayer gesture, with a simple stole or surplice engraved above; this may be intended to represent a temple priest.

While the structures are primarily temples, smaller domestic buildings have been uncovered more recently.

Despite this, it is clear that the primary use of the site was cultic and not domestic.

Schmidt believes this "cathedral on a hill" was a pilgrimage destination attracting worshipers up to a hundred miles distant.

Butchered bones found in large numbers from local game such as deer, gazelle, pigs, and geese have been identified as refuse derived from hunting and food prepared for the congregants.

Through the radiocarbon method, the end of stratum IIII can be fixed at c. 9000 BCE; its beginnings are estimated to 11,000 BCE or earlier.

Thus, the structures not only predate pottery, metallurgy, and the invention of writing or the wheel; they were built before the so-called Neolithic Revolution, i.e., the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry around 9000 BCE.

The early Neolithic human occupation of Mesopotamia is, like the previous Epipaleolithic period, confined to the foothill zones of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains and the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys.

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) period (10,000–8700 BCE) sees the introduction of agriculture.

The Natufian culture in Upper Mesopotamia, contemporaneous with the Zarzian in the Zagros, is attested over a much wider region and is characterized by open-air sites that are semi-permanently occupied.

In the Zagros, this period has been excavated at Zawi Chemi, Shanidar, and M'lefaat.

In the area of the Syrian Upper Euphrates, villages of Natufian hunter-gatherers that were occupied since the eleventh millennium BCE have been excavated at Abu Hureyra and Mureybet.

One such village, established about 9000 in southeastern Anatolia on the Turkish-Iranian border, consists of houses made from mud and reeds, with conical roofs and circular stone bases.

It is the first known example of a permanent settlement.

Copper was known to some of the oldest civilizations on record, and has a history of use that is at least 10,000 years old.

Some estimates of copper's discovery place this event around 9000 BCE in the Middle East.

A copper pendant found in what is now northern Iraq dates to 8700 BCE.

Jericho, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, emerges in this epoch.

The World’s Oldest Canoe: The Pesse Canoe (c. 8000 BCE)

The oldest known canoe in the world, dating to approximately 8000 BCE, was discovered in Drenthe, Netherlands. It is associated with Mesolithic Maglemosian-like tribes, who inhabited the region following the end of the last Ice Age.

Discovery and Characteristics

• The Pesse Canoe, as it is now known, was found in peat deposits during road construction in 1955.
• It was carved from a single log of Scots pine, using stone tools to create a hollowed-out vessel.
• The canoe measures approximately 3 meters (10 feet) in length, suggesting it was designed for individual or small-group travel on lakes and rivers.

Significance of the Find

• This discovery provides direct evidence of Mesolithic watercraft technology, highlighting the importance of waterways for transport, fishing, and exploration.
• The canoe demonstrates that hunter-gatherer societies of the early Holocene were capable of advanced woodworking and tool use.
• It reinforces the idea that waterways played a crucial role in the movement of early human populations and the development of maritime culture in Northern Europe.

Today, the Pesse Canoe is preserved at the Drents Museum in Assen, Netherlands, offering a fascinating glimpse into early human ingenuity and adaptation.

The Sacrum bone of Tequixquiac, an ancient paleo-Indian sculpture carved in a pleistocene-era bone of a prehistoric camelid, will be discovered by Mexican geologist and botanist Mariano de la Bárcena in 1870 in Tequixquiac, Mexico. The carving, dated around 14,000 BCE to 7,000 B.C.E., is considered among the earliest pieces of art from the North American continent. Although the original purpose of the sculpture is unknown, some scholars will say that the carving held some religious value due to the sacredness of the sacrum bone in later Mesoamerican cultures.

The carver was likely nomadic and hunted large animals such as mammoths and gathered fruits as evidenced by archaeological evidence found at the site. According to Bárcena, the carver likely used a sharp instrument to cut the holes.

  
 

Archaeological evidence testifies to the presence of early hunters and gatherers in Mexico around 10,000 to 8000 BCE.