ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes what is known about the chronology of the Upper Pleistocene so as to apply, as far as possible, the geological events and prehistoric sites of Central Africa. The Upper Pleistocene of the United States can be described according to the same schematism. There, also, the maximum extension of the moraines is dated from —18,000 to —24,000 years: it is the Tazewell Stage which slightly precedes the Farmdale loess and follows the Tazewell loess. The beginning of the later Interglacial is brought to around 175,000 or 240,000 years (depending on the methods of dating and extrapolation in the deep-sea cores), which definitively points to a long chronology of the Pleistocene (much more than a million years if the rest of the stratigraphy matches this rhythm). The chapter examines whether the curves deduced by astronomical methods are somehow comparable to the objective schema which result from our present knowledge.
