The Wolstonian Stage, a Middle Pleistocene stage…

The Middle Pleistocene, which began approximately seven hundred and eighty-one thousand thousand years ago, to the Late Pleistocene around one hundred and twenty-six thousand years ago.

The change to a cooler, dry, seasonal climate has considerable impacts on Pliocene vegetation, reducing tropical species worldwide.

Deciduous forests proliferate, coniferous forests and tundra cover much of the north, and grasslands spread on all continents (except Antarctica).

Tropical forests are limited to a tight band around the equator, and in addition to dry savannas, deserts appear in Asia and Africa.

The so-called Levallois technique of stone working, in which a large thin flake is struck from a prepared core and used as a blank for making more specialized tools such as knives and scrapers, is invented during this period.

A striking platform is formed at one end, then the core's edges are trimmed by flaking off pieces around the outline of the intended flake.

This creates a domed shape on the side of the core, known as a tortoise core as the various scars and rounded form are reminiscent of a tortoise's shell.

When the striking platform is finally hit, a flake separates from the core with a distinctive plano-convex profile and with all of its edges sharpened by the earlier trimming work.

This method provides much greater control over the size and shape of the final flake, which is employed as a scraper or knife; the technique can also be adapted to produce projectile points known as Levallois points.

The technique is first found in the Lower Paleolithic but is most commonly associated with the Neanderthal Mousterian industries of the Middle Paleolithic.

In the Levant, Levallois methods are also in use in the Upper Paleolithic and later.

The distinctive forms of the flakes were originally thought to indicate a wide-ranging Levallois culture but the wide geographical and temporal spread of the technique has rendered this interpretation obsolete.

The more refined Levallois technique consists of a series of consecutive strikes, by which scrapers, slicers ("racloirs"), needles, and flattened needles are made.

The global average temperature in the mid-Pliocene (three hundred and thirty thousand to three hundred thousand years ago) is two to three degree centigrade higher than today; global sea level is twenty-five meters higher than today.

Britain first becomes an island about three hundred and fifty thousand years ago, near the beginning of the Wolstonian stage, named after the site of Wolston in the English county of Warwickshire where corresponding deposits were first identified.

This period sees the introduction of Levallois flint tools, possibly by humans arriving from Africa, although finds from Swanscombe and Botany Pit in Purfleet support Levallois technology as a European rather than African introduction.

This more advanced flint technology, which made hunting more efficient, therefore made Britain a more worthwhile place to remain until the increasingly cool climate of the Wolstonian Stage, which apparently includes three periods of glaciation, made continued habitation unattractive, if not impossible.

Acheulean flint tools, typically found with Homo erectus remains, have been found in Wolstonian deposits.

The Northern Hemisphere ice sheet is ephemeral before the onset of extensive glaciation over Greenland that occurs in the late Pliocene around three hundred thousand years ago.

The formation of an Arctic ice cap is signaled by an abrupt shift in oxygen isotope ratios and ice-rafted cobbles in the North Atlantic and North Pacific ocean beds.

Mid-latitude glaciation is probably underway before the end of the epoch.

The global cooling that occurs during the Pliocene may have spurred on the disappearance of forests and the spread of grasslands and savannas.

Neanderthals probably diverge from Homo heidelbergensis some three hundred thousand years ago in Europe during the Wolstonian Stage, from three hundred and fifty-two thousand to one hundred and thirty thousand years ago.

The Clactonian flint tool industry develop at sites such as Barnfield Pit in Kent during the period of relatively warm climate from around three hundred thousand to two hundred thousand years ago.

The period produces a rich and widespread distribution of sites by Paleolithic standards.

Clactonian tools are made by Homo erectus rather than modern humans.

Uncertainty over the relationship between the Clactonian and Acheulean industries is still unresolved.

As in Africa, fossils that seem to represent subspecies of Homo sapiens have been found in Central Europe at Vértesszőlős (about three hundred and fifty thousand years old), ...

...Steinheim (two hundred and fifty thousand to three hundred and fifty thousand years old), ...

...Biache, and ...