About twenty-five thousand years ago, on the river Don in Russia, people laid at least sixty-four mammoth skulls in a ring more than forty feet across. Most of Europe that far north had already been emptied by the cold. These people stayed. How?
This is what the evidence actually shows about surviving an Ice Age winter: how cold and dark it really was, why a tropical body struggles in the cold, the bone needles and fitted fur clothes, fires that burned bone, a hunger for fat, the people who held on and the regions that were abandoned, and the big open question of what the mammoth bone rings were for. Where scientists are unsure, we say so.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Sixty-four mammoth skulls
00:30 How cold it really was
02:03 A tropical body in the cold
03:06 The real survival gear
06:26 Fire, and why it was not enough
08:15 Starving on a full stomach
10:28 Not cavemen
12:20 Stay or leave
12:59 A group effort
14:03 Did they sleep through it?
14:36 So how did they survive?
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Dates are approximate and come from radiocarbon dating. The coldest stretch of the last Ice Age, the Last Glacial Maximum, ran from about 26,500 to about 19,000 years ago. Neanderthal examples are marked as Neanderthal; they are often far older than the last Ice Age.
SOURCES
University of Exeter news release on Kostenki 11 (2020):
https://news-archive.exeter.ac.uk/2020/march/title_782319_en.html
Chronology and function of a new circular mammoth bone structure from Kostenki 11 (figshare):
https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Chronology_and_function_of_a_new_circular_mammoth_bone_structure_from_Kostenki_11/29758130
Smithsonian Human Origins: Homo neanderthalensis:
https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/species/homo-neanderthalensis
Archaeology magazine: furry hooded outfits (2016):
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz: Neanderthals ran fat factories:
https://press.uni-mainz.de/neanderthals-ran-fat-factories-125000-years-ago/
Gilligan et al. 2024, Ice Age clothing (open-access full text, Europe PMC):
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/europepmc/webservices/rest/PMC11212769/fullTextXML
#IceAge #History #Prehistory
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