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RESEARCH PRODUCT

5. Introduction — palaeoclimate reconstructions and dating

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Publisher Summary This chapter describes four interglacials preceding the Holocene—that is, during the time from about 100 to 450 kyr. The first knowledge on this time has been extracted almost 40 years ago from marine deep sea cores with a sampling resolution of several thousand of years. Deep ocean sediments can be easily dated, because δ18O stratigraphy can be applied all over the ocean basins and tuned directly to the ice volume/sea-level master curve of SPECMAP, which is based on the beat of the orbital insolation cyclicities. This dynamic climate evolution of the past interglacial must have been of high importance also for the evolution of mankind. Neanderthal hominids lived and hunted in Europe during the Eemian, but were replaced during the marine isotope age (MIS) 3 by the modern humans. Genetic data indicate that these early humans migrated out of Africa during MIS 5 and lived in the Mediterranean during MIS 4 and the early MIS 3. Why and when they exactly moved into Northern Europe and Asia is not related to the past interglacial climate. The reason why they left Africa during the early MIS 5, however, might well have to been seen in this context.