The recent publication of new evidence bearing on the age of Pleistocene events makes in opportune to review the present status of Pleistocene chronology. The past years have seen the establishment of a palaeomagnetic stratigraphy and its application to sediments in the Atlantic; the revised correlation of Pacific deep-sea cores; the determination of radiometric dates for the Rhine terraces, for various high sea-levels, and for a few deep-sea cores. There has, too, been a renewed interest in the Köppen-Milankovitch insolation hypothesis. This new investigation of the Pleistocene time-scale is an outcome of Professor Shotton's 1966 Presidential Address to the Society. The need for a synthesis of the different lines of evidence is shown by the diversity of dates put forward for the Mindel glaciation. The ages assigned to the beginning of this glaciation differ by a factor of seven, and the estimates of its duration by a factor of twenty (Table I).
Had there been, within the sphere of existing dating methods, any simple straigthforward way of finding the age of Pleistocene events, a satisfactory time-scale would already be available. Not until a number of independent and very different lines of research had yielded their evidence was it possible to make a synthesis that points the way to a Pleistocene time-scale. Even now some of the conclusions can be reached by only one route, and there are many aspects of the problem of dating the Pleistocene which need further investigation. Amongst the different pieces of evidence used, some are well
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