Impact of the German Harz Mountain Weichselian ice-shield and valley glacier development onto Palaeolithic and megafauna disappearances

• The Harz Mountain Range, northern Germany, has Late Pleistocene glaciers.
• Glaciers reached from 1141 a.s.l. Mt Brocken down in several valleys.
• The 11 km long Oder Valley glacier has best preserved glacio-fluvial deposits.
• Bode Valley glaciers/river terraces are found with relict sediments in caves/dolines.
• Palaeolithic and megafauna landscape use changed depended on the glaciations.

Three Pleistocene stages are recorded by 3D Google-Earth geomorphology, cave sediments, river terraces, megafauna, archaeological sites of the Harz Mountain Range and its forelands of northern Germany (central Europe, peak 1141 a.s.l.). Late Pleistocene glaciation stages are modeled preliminary in valley elevations between 407 and 760 a.s.l., starting all southeast below the Brocken Ice Field (above 750 a.s.l.). The 14–11 km long Oder and Bode Valley glaciers left typical moraines, kames, or dead ice depressions, such as fluvial cave relic sediments. The Bode River glacier passed during the LGM the Rübeland Caves, where it deposited reworked kames/lateral moraines in the Baumann's Cave, which floods mixed a Neanderthal camp, leopard lair and cave bear den area. 60 km downstream, fluvial to aeolian deposits were trapped in the gypsum karst doline Westeregeln (Neanderthal camp/hyena den). Late Aurignacians replaced in the region Neanderthals, but a gap of Late Palaeolithic (Gravettian–Magdalenian – 26,000–16,000 BP) settlement, and latest starting speleothem genesis (around 24,260 ± 568 BP) correlate to the LGM, when an “arctic reindeer fauna” with alpine elements (ibex, chamois) accumulated in bone assemblages of a wolverine, polar fox, mustelid, such as European eagle owl dens, which allow landscape reconstructions.