Skip to content
YearMaps

Cenozoic Era · Neogene Period

Earth 20 Million Years Ago: Grasslands and Apes

What Earth looked like 20 million years ago in the Miocene: grasslands spreading, apes in Africa and Arabia joining Asia.

Globe of Earth 20 million years ago in the Miocene with continents near their modern positionsSpin it in 3D and move through time

Map: Ancient maps: PALEOMAP PaleoDEMs (Scotese & Wright 2018), CC BY 4.0 · Natural Earth.

20 million years ago, in the Early Miocene, Antarctica was covered in ice but the rest of the world was a little warmer than today. Grasslands were starting to spread, and grazing animals evolved to eat them.

Apes such as Proconsul lived in the forests of East Africa. Africa and Arabia were pushing north into Eurasia, closing the old Tethys seaway between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

The Himalaya and the Andes kept rising, changing the paths of winds and rainfall over Asia and South America.

Part of the Cenozoic Era & The Quaternary Ice Ages.