Twenty thousand years ago, at the coldest point of the last Ice Age, there were no houses, no jackets and no lighters. Most of us wouldn’t last one night. So how did our ancestors survive? Bone needles and fitted fur clothes, houses built from mammoth bones, fires fuelled by bones, why lean meat alone could make you sick, the first dogs, the Neanderthals who vanished… and why, technically, we are still living in an Ice Age.
Narration voice is AI-generated (Kokoro TTS) and the illustrations were made with Google Flow (AI). Research, script and editing are our own. Numbers are rounded; the temperature graph is simplified.
CHAPTERS
0:00 One night, 20,000 years ago
0:30 The frozen world
1:34 Problem #1: The cold
2:47 Problem #2: Shelter
3:47 Problem #3: Food
4:57 Problem #4: Each other
5:56 The other humans
6:29 The thaw
7:15 We’re still in an Ice Age
SOURCES
– Clark et al. 2009, Science 325:710 – The Last Glacial Maximum
– Tierney et al. 2020, Nature 584:569 – Glacial cooling and climate sensitivity (~6 C colder)
– Lambeck et al. 2014, PNAS 111:15296 – Sea level ~120-134 m lower
– Toups et al. 2011, Molecular Biology and Evolution 28:29 – Clothing lice and the origin of clothing
– Gilligan 2010, J. Archaeological Method and Theory – Origins of clothing
– Pryor et al. 2020, Antiquity 94:323 – Kostenki 11 mammoth-bone circle (at least 64 mammoths)
– Soffer 1985; Iakovleva 2015 – Mezhyrich mammoth-bone dwellings, Ukraine
– Speth & Spielmann 1983, J. Anthropological Archaeology – Lean meat and ‘rabbit starvation’
– Trinkaus et al. 2014; Formicola 2007 – Sungir burials, Russia
– Janssens et al. 2018, J. Archaeological Science 92:126 – Bonn-Oberkassel dog
– Higham et al. 2014, Nature 512:306 – Timing of Neanderthal disappearance
– Green et al. 2010; Prufer et al. 2014 – Neanderthal DNA in living people
– Rasmussen et al. 2006 (GICC05); Alley 2000 – Younger Dryas and abrupt warming
– Vartanyan et al. 1993; Arppe et al. 2019 – Last mammoths on Wrangel Island
– Zeder 2011, Current Anthropology – Origins of agriculture
#iceage #history #stoneage
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