Hemphillian
North American faunal stage
The Hemphillian North American Stage on the geologic timescale is a North American faunal stage according to the North American Land Mammal Ages chronology (NALMA), typically set from 10,300,000 to 4,900,000 years BP. It is usually considered to overlap the Tortonian age of the Late Miocene and Zanclean age of the Early Pliocene. The Hemphillian is preceded by the Clarendonian and followed by the Blancan NALMA stages.
The Hemphillian can be further divided into the substages of:
Late/Upper Hemphillian: Lower boundary source of the base of the Hemphillian (approximate).
late Early Hemphillian: Lower boundary source of the base of the Hemphillian (approximate). Upper boundary source: base of Blancan (approximate).
early Early Hemphillian: Upper boundary source: base of Blancan (approximate).
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Hemphillian” is north American faunal stage. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Hemphillian, North and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “north American faunal stage” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 18, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q5712685. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hemphillian” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.