Great Apes who have the homo sapiens collection of genes, can easily be chased back 250,000 years. Our divergence from the rest of the Great Apes occurred about half a million years ago which would have been toward the end of the geological epoch called the Pleistocene which consisted of 25 ice ages and lasted about two and a half million years.
By the end of the Pleistocene (only 11,000 years ago) much of the mega-fauna, giant flightless birds, huge meat eating bears, mammoths and for some reason giant sloths were no longer existent, and here one argument for their disappearance are tool makers who could make fire and make an even bigger deal about going all alpha around hunting down and grilling meat.
Our current Epoch or Age, it's a little early to think of 11,000 years as much more than a hiccup of some sort, is already being called The Holocene, which rather ominously means wholly new time. It began with the end of the Neolithic, or when non-nomadic-farming started to become this period referred to as Civilization, or city dwelling. At the moment we are already in what the enthusiasts would like to call The Anthropocene, or the Age of Man.
Meanwhile the less self absorbed have already given the Holocene three subdivisions. The first is Greenlandian, 11,000 to about 8,000 years ago, characterized by quite dramatic retreat of ice and rising sea levels. The second is Northgrippian, ended about 4,000 years ago, it got especially warm and good for farming. The third subdivision is the Meghalayan, its main characteristic is an extended period of drought that caused the Bronze Age collapse.
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