PLEISTOCENE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does Pleistocene mean? 

• PLEISTOCENE (noun)
  The noun PLEISTOCENE has 1 sense:

1. from two million to 11 thousand years ago; extensive glaciation of the northern hemisphere; the time of human evolution

  Familiarity information: PLEISTOCENE used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• PLEISTOCENE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

From two million to 11 thousand years ago; extensive glaciation of the northern hemisphere; the time of human evolution

Classified under:

Nouns denoting time and temporal relations

Synonyms:

Glacial epoch; Pleistocene; Pleistocene epoch

Instance hypernyms:

epoch (a unit of geological time that is a subdivision of a period and is itself divided into ages)

Holonyms ("Pleistocene" is a part of...):

Age of Man; Quaternary; Quaternary period (last 2 million years)

 Context examples 

An epoch of the Quaternary period dating from the end of the Pleistocene approximately 11,000 years ago until the present.

(Holocene epoch, NOAA Paleoclimate Glossary)

Researchers have now used ancient protein sequencing – based on ground-breaking technology called mass spectrometry – to retrieve genetic information from the tooth of a 1.77 million year old Stephanorhinus – an extinct rhinoceros which lived in Eurasia during the Pleistocene.

(‘Game-changing’ research could solve evolution mysteries, University of Cambridge)

In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older—the same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib; that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on the page of history.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)