A Brief Overview of the Quaternary Period for Middle School Science Classes

Dec 17, 2024

3 min read

Earth history is a fascinating topic! It is also a massive topic! The reading passage below will teach you all about the Quaternary Period. If you want to learn more (and why wouldn't you?!), you can check out my Earth History page. I also have all of my passages available at Teachers Pay Teachers. They come with so many extras to get your students thinking about the content! I also recommend scrolling to the bottom of the page to check out my digital picture book on the Quaternary Period!

Quaternary Period Reading Passage for Middle School Science

The Quaternary period is the most recent period in Earth’s history. We are living in the Quaternary period. The period is made up of two epochs, the Pleistocene epoch and the Holocene epoch.

Ice Ages

The Pleistocene epoch was made up of several ice ages with warmer interglacial periods between the ice ages. During an ice age, huge ice sheets would cover the land. An ice sheet is a giant glacier. During the interglacials, parts of these ice sheets would melt. At its coldest, 30 percent of the Earth was covered in ice during the Pleistocene epoch.

Wooly Mammoths

However, not all of the Earth was ice. The massive grasslands of the Neogene period still existed, but they were much colder than before. These grasslands became known as “mammoth steppes”

because wooly mammoths and other large animals lived there. Carnivores, such as the saber-tooth tigers, cave bears, and giant wolves, hunted the wooly mammoths, mastodons, giant bison, and wooly rhinoceroses.

Early Humans

While Australopithecus first evolved during the Pliocene epoch, the Quaternary period saw the evolution of modern humans. The genus Homo first appeared during the Pleistocene epoch. The earliest species of humans were Homo habilis. It was named Homo habilis because it used stone tools. However, these early humans still had many characteristics of Australopithecus.

Homo erectus was the next species of human to evolve. Unlike Homo habilis, Homo erectus walked upright. These early humans also used tools. They most likely originated in Africa but spread to Europe and Asia around 1.6 million years ago.

Modern Humans

Modern humans, Homo sapiens, evolved around two hundred thousand years ago. However, a fossil found recently in Morocco, was found to be three hundred thousand years old. Homo sapiens spread all over the world during the Quaternary period. They arrived in Europe around forty-five thousand years ago, and they crossed the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia into Alaska around thirty thousand years ago. By twelve thousand years ago, humans were living on every continent on Earth except Antarctica. Scientists believe humans spread as they followed animals migrating because of climate change.

Humans coexisted with the massive animals of the Pleistocene epoch until about twelve thousand years ago when most of these animals went extinct. Scientists believe this extinction was the result of a warming climate, a comet in Canada, and overhunting by humans.

Quaternary Period Picture Book

Looking for another way to learn about the Quaternary Period? Check out this picture book version. The pages are a part of my Earth History bundle on Teachers Pay Teachers.