To anthropologists, man is the child of the Pleistocene ice age, that period beginning roughly 1,000,000 years ago when he was forced to adapt to fierce variations in climate, and when the brutalities of nature hastened his evolution from the apes. Dating the period precisely has always been difficult. On land, erosion has obliterated almost all trace of the Pleistocene's earliest glaciers. On most parts of the cold, quiet ocean bottom, where remnants of prehistory have survived, ancient sediments have piled up too deeply for convenient study. The cylindrical cores that have been...
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