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What Earth Looked Like 1 Million Years Ago?
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old or 4500 million years old. Considering this, one million years is not that much. Even so, the Earth was very different from now.
One million years ago, during the time of The Pleistocene Epoch, the Earth was in the midst of The Last Ice Age. This started 2.6 million years ago and lasted until about 11.700 years ago. Because of the amount of frozen water, the level of the oceans would have been lower. This means that much more land would have been exposed.
More than that, the two ice caps would have been much bigger that they are today. It is estimated that the sea level would have been 125 meters lower that it is today. Therefore, a much bigger portion of land was available to be used by the living species from that period.
One million years ago, the British Isles were completely connected with the rest of the Europe. The Baltic Sea was from another story, a much more recent one. The Mediterranean Sea was looking different than it looks today. Africa and The Arabian Peninsula were connected by a huge lake.
Canada and the North America were completely covered in ice. Speaking of United States, there were a few large lakes in the west, that no longer exists, and the Great Lakes, from the middle America were not even created yet. All in all, the climate was much colder and drier than it is today.
If we look in the East, Japan wasn’t an island yet, because it was connected to the land. What is even more amazing is that most of the south Asian islands were forming a single island almost connected to Australia. Therefore, the differences were significant.
The temperature in the world, one million years ago, was 5 to 10 degrees C. In the Antarctic, the temperatures sometimes dropped below -100 degrees C.
Modern humans didn’t even exist back then. Our last human ancestor would have appeared somewhere between 350.000 and 260.000 years ago. Even so, some of our ancestors, like Homo Erectus, originated in Africa, were already walking upright by that time. More recently they populated Asia and Europe.
