The Ancients - How to Survive the Ice Age

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

When you think of the 'Ice Age', tales of saber-toothed predators and hulking megafauna probably come to mind - but what else do we know about prehistoric culture that lived 25,000 years ago, and how did they live? From hunting Woolly Mammoths, to thriving in freezing temperatures - what did it take to survive the Ice Age?In this episode Tristan welcomes author Cody Cassidy to the podcast to look at what it took to live through the Ice Age, and how one particular culture in Eastern Europe - the Pavlovian Culture - adapted to the extremes. Looking at the changing landscape, the cause of the big freeze, and how to take down a Woolly Mammoth - do you have what it takes to survive the Ice Age? You can get Cody's book here.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's episode, well, how to survive in the Ice Age. This is a really fun little episode. We're not going to be covering the whole of the Ice Age. This is a really fun little episode. We're not going to be covering the

whole of the Ice Age, that would be mad, but we are focusing in on an extraordinary prehistoric culture that lived some 25,000 years ago and had to survive in a terrible climate, eating a diet almost exclusively, we believe, of mammoth. So how did they do this? How were they able to survive? Well, today's guest is the author Cody Cassidy. Now, Cody, he's big on TikTok and he's also released this new book, which explores how people were able to survive in very difficult conditions all throughout history and prehistory. For instance, there's another chapter exploring how you could have survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius if you were in Pompeii in 79 AD. Hint there, get out early. But I digress. Cody's hits today talk all

about surviving in the Ice Age and i really do hope you enjoy cody it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today buddy thank you so much for having me you've written this guide to surviving through these various terrifying events in history it must have been quite a fun experience writing this, going from the Ice Age that we're talking about today, all the way to more recent deadly events too. Yeah, you know, the idea started, I read a study that, funnily enough, suggested that you could outrun, or a person could outrun the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and they sort of delved deep into that science. And I found it kind of a fascinating way to learn about ancient history. And I sort of wanted to expand that on to other times and disasters and cultures

because I sort of felt like it gave you a grounded perspective rather than a sort of 40,000-foot view that we often get from history. I sort of liked more like turn left or turn right or the sort of gruesome details about these different events that sort of gave you a little bit of entertainment and Also a lot you could pack a lot of information to these. Much more than a little bit of entertainment as you say It's gruesome but it also incredibly entertaining too and the right answer there that you started off with ancient history and then you went from there because that Is the place to start and with our talk today on the ice age i mean first of all

when you're looking at these topics you say you start the tyrannosaurus rex so down in dinosaur times i mean why did you decide the ice age is another one of these topics to cover you know i think in looking at the topics i wanted to focus on a lot of events that i feel like i had heard about or people had heard about, but didn't know that well. And another factor I wanted was to, I like to talk about, I'm sort of a background as a science writer. And so I wanted there to be a science component to most of these as well. And I found that in sort of trying to understand exactly why the ice age even happened, why the planet cools and warms so dramatically over different time periods. And it was something as I thought about, I realized I

understood very poorly. So I wanted to dive into that. And then I also wanted to just understand how people with sticks and stones as weapons could bring down a mammoth, which seems impossible and impossibly dangerous. I mean, absolutely. And we're going to definitely get into that. But I really like what you highlighted there about these names from history, which we think we know a lot about, like a name like the Ice Age. But when you delve into it, I mean, what actually is the Ice Age? So that seems like a nice way to start it off, Cody. I mean, how far back can we go with the Ice Age? What do we mean by the Ice Age? So to begin with, the Ice Age is a bit of a misnomer, at least if you're talking to a climate scientist, because technically they define an Ice Age as any time ice permanently covers the

Northern Hemisphere, which if you look at our Northern Hem now it does. So this we actually are living in a ice age and we have been for the last three million years. So when you're talking about sort of what popular culture defines as the ice age is actually sort of the last glacial maximum and of course the climate changes dramatically over millions of years. This was before this I mean if we go back to the Triassic and the dinosaur period, you could have swum in the Arctic Ocean and sort of fern forested beaches. But I became interested in why three million years ago, this sort of dramatic climate change occurred. And it turns out that that is, of course, our climate is dictated by carbon in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide. It sort of serves as our planet's insulation.

It captures heat. And so the more carbon is in the atmosphere, the warmer the climate is. And if we want to get into the weeds, it's kind of interesting. Oh, absolutely, mate. Yeah, let's go into the weeds. Let's delve right into it. Okay, so the vast majority of carbon dioxide on Earth exists in rocks, right? So the primary method in which it's released from rocks is, of course, volcanic activity. There

have been enormous volcanic eruptions that have released vast amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that's what, prior to the Industrial Revolution, can heat up the Earth. But the opposite of that is the is of course rock creation that occurs um much less spectacularly and on a longer scale but it nevertheless decreases the earth so 200 million years ago at the end of the triassic to give an example a massive 500 year volcanic eruption released about a million cubic miles of lava and warmed up the planet about five degrees this is actually about the same amount of carbon dioxide that humans have released, all of humans have released. In that one, 75% of species died.

So we are in the process of something similar to that. And so if we go from 200 million years ago to that other day, which you hinted at, which you highlighted earlier, which is 3 million years ago, which seems to be at the beginning of the ice Age. What is this massive event that seems to occur around there, which really almost triggers this great shift? Right. So three million years ago, there's a massive tectonic collision, the collision between northern Australia and the Indonesian plate, which is still ongoing. And this, of course, raises up a ton of fresh, what they call mafic rock, a type of magma. And this new rock is loaded with minerals, calcium and magnesium. And when it hits it, particularly in the equator where there's lots of rain, this fresh mafic

rock erodes. It combines with dissolved carbon dioxide in the ocean, and it sort of sequesters this carbon dioxide, which was otherwise going back and forth between the dioxide in the ocean, and it sort of sequesters this carbon dioxide, which was otherwise going back and forth between the ocean and the atmosphere, into vast beds of limestone rock primarily. So this, over a long period of time, what's happening is a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and in the water is being locked away in rocks. And this is sort of removing oceans, removing the Earth's blanket, so to speak, and Earth begins to cool. And this is sort of a pattern that we see going way back hundreds of million years. Primarily when there are ice ages, there are,

the cause is a massive tectonic collision, but only in the tropics where there's lots of rain and lots of erosion and lots of carbon dioxide is being sequestered. But it's so interesting, isn't it, how an event there in that part of the world, you know, and you can have parallels with, let's say, the asteroid strike or anything like that. An event that occurs in one part of the world, you say in the tropics, but it has consequences for the entirety of the world, for millions of years to follow. I mean, as a scientist, scientists not by background, but facts like that just absolutely astonish me. Yeah, it's hard for us to comprehend because this is happening on such a, the geologic timeframe is so much longer than anything, any sort of timeframe that humans are familiar with. So

it's difficult to comprehend how slow but how impactful these processes are. What's also interesting about this is that when you think of the ice age, it's not one continuous line of just always ice over certain parts of the world. Well, these interglacial periods you get too, you also get these warm periods also mentioned, well, that also occur. Yeah. So we are in an that also occur yeah so we are in an ice age now but we are in a sort of glacial minimum and of course 25 000 years ago there was what they call the last glacial maximum which is sort of in what popular culture we refer to as

the ice age and these are dictated by smaller amounts of changes of carbon in the atmosphere but carbon changes nonetheless and these caused these are caused by, as Earth rotates, it sort of wobbles a bit like a spinning top. And these wobbles occur on 40,000-year cycles. So there are sort of slowly tilts toward the sun and slowly tilts away. And this tilting isn't actually enough. It's not as if we are dramatically closer to the sun and

therefore receiving a lot more heat. It's far less significant than that. But what it does do is change ocean currents. And these ocean currents, because carbon can be sequestered in these, sort of carbon dioxide passes between the air and the ocean. As these ocean currents change, it turns out when we sort of tilt away, a lot more carbon dioxide is sequestered within the water, within the oceans. And so this, about 25,000 years ago, the amount of carbon dioxide was about 65% of current, or I should say pre-industrial human levels. So this caused dramatic cooling. Temperature was about 15 degrees on average cooler back then than it is now. And of course, massive glaciation. So let's go back there for 25,000 years to the glacial

maximum that you mentioned earlier. And if we focus in on, let's say, the European steppe, which I know you focused in on your book, Eastern Europe Today. Now, what did this area of the world look like 25,000 years ago? Yes, it's quite difficult to imagine. So glaciers or ice sheets, basically, were covering all of northern Europe and Scandinavia. These are as high as skyscrapers, sometimes even higher, almost as much as a mile. And people are living sort of at the base of these almost, right where they stop on tundra. But the ice had different effects to it because the massive ice sheets sort of blocked moisture from the Atlantic. So rainfall was very little.

These were very dry areas. But the soil was really rich because of all the glacial deposits. So you had sort of an interesting dichotomy where in the highlands, it was basically Arctic desert. But in the lowlands, where there were river flowing, it was very lush. And so you had a lot of fauna. And the fauna was a kind of interesting fauna because it's animals that we're familiar with, but they're sort of living in odd juxtaposition. You sort of had packs of lions chasing reindeer, or you had, you know, bears, wolves, and woolly rhinoceroses, but you also had cheetah and other animals that we would think of as living in hot African

deserts or savannah. So it was a kind of familiar but unfamiliar landscape. And you also have some very well-known extinct fauna, or should I say mega fauna, living in that area of the world too, don't you? Yes, cave bears and woolly rhinoceroses, and of course the big woolly mammoth, which I really became interested in just because it was such an unbelievably powerful creature that humans somehow hunted. And who can blame you? Apart from maybe some of the dinosaur species, I think of think of all extinct species in the world i mean the woolly mammoth is the one that gauges so much attention because we find them absolutely incredible and fascinating and we will get back to them very soon so we've got all of these fauna living alongside this rich

area this rich landscape if we're not thinking of the highland Arctic deserts. But who were the people, the Homo sapiens, the communities that were coexisting in this part of the world? Well, we call them the Gravititon culture. This is the culture that spanned across Europe at the time. Well, they varied, but they were in general quite tall, surprisingly, more like the men averaged almost six feet in height. And women were a bit of a smaller, averaged about five foot two. They were slender. They were mobile cultures that moved with herds, at least in Eastern Europe. Interestingly, they had high cheekbones. So it would have been a sort of a runway look, almost a model, the tall, slender,

high cheekbones sort of model on the runway almost. And then, of course, they were, materially, they're sort of famous for having these carvings, the Venus figurines that are sort of voluptuous women. How they use them or what they represented is a matter sort of of speculation. It's hard to define why someone uses or looks at art, whether they were for religious purposes or not, is difficult to say. But certainly very sophisticated culture, sophisticated burials, carved tools, even textiles, and sort of wore these thick parka-like clothing out of small animals that they probably trapped, like wolverine and fox. I mean, that's fascinating. I love how you know more.

You also know about the clothing as well because i'm guessing to try and piece together more about this culture these people it's looking at those archaeological remains that i guess can be sometimes really few and far between but trying to piece together what life must have been like for these people during this incredibly difficult time you know the glacial maximum some 25 000 years ago yeah the of course the clothing doesn't survive this long and so they sort of you can look at the bones of the animals that they hunted and you can find animals like wolverine which are small fox which wouldn't have made much sense to catch for their meat so presume that they would have used for clothing and there's also a couple of figurines that have hoods,

that look like they have hoods on them. So I sort of presume that this was like a parka-like clothing. And then, of course, there's bone needles too that signify perhaps sewing. Now, you mentioned Gravettian culture, but what about the Pavlovian culture? What is this in regards to it? This is, yeah, a subset of the Gravititan that I became pretty interested in because they're sort of these odd mammoth hunting specialists that were living in the in eastern europe and in what is now poland and in some of their camps they have they're sort of 98 percent of the bones are mammoth bones and they're sort of roving they

move with mammoth herds, it looks like, and they specialize in hunting this awesome creature, which I found fascinating. I mean, absolutely. Of all the creatures living there, of all of the fauna in these rich, nutrient-rich areas of the Ice Age, they choose what is arguably

the most difficult prey animal at all. I mean, it is absolutely fascinating. And that is from the archaeological remains. Is it from bones found in these camps, as you highlighted? Yeah, they just look at the camps around these. These were temporary camps, so they were probably, you know, they had to move with the herds as the herds moved. But in some of them, yes, they'll just be massive, massive, massive bones. And nearly all of them, in some cases virtually all of them, are mammoths.

So it looks like they were just, like I said, mammoth hunting specialists. Do we have any idea why hunting a mammoth was so appealing to these people? I mean, was there something in the meat of the mammoth that was really appealing? Well, their size, I mean, if you can catch one, it would have certainly made an absolute bonanza. The amount of meat, and not just the meat, but their bones for tools, and there weren't trees or very many trees at this latitude, so they must have had to use probably their bones for even their fires. They certainly would have had to cook the meat, and without much wood, they could have used their bones to cook their food,

and smaller animals, of course, wouldn't have provided nearly as much as that, so it was certainly a great risk, but the reward was also great as well so let's go on to hunting one of these mammoths. What sorts of weapons therefore, of sticks and stones, what weapons are we talking about? There's a few misconceptions. A lot of, at least in pop culture, we think they sort of pushed them off cliffs or trapped them in that way and that doesn't appear to be the case actually at all. They found some of these ancient hunting sites, and they used primarily spears,

but not spears that we would commonly think of. They're not throwing spears at mammoths. Mammoth skin was as thick as an elephant's. That, as you can imagine, would have been highly ineffective. It would have turned a dangerous activity into absolute suicide. So what they used are these, what they call atlatls or spear throwers. And these are simple tools, basically just a stick. Actually, they've sort of become popular.

A version of them has become popular around dog parks lately, is if you've seen those tennis ball throwers, which if you pick up a tennis ball and can throw it, and it can add a huge amount of distance to your throw, and it's adding another piece of leverage to your throwing arm so it's like sort of like having a second elbow and just by doing that you can take what would be sort of a mammoth tickler a thrown spear and hurl it speeds above 60 miles an hour and you don't make quite the same spears as you would a sort of handheld spear it's a little bit longer. It looks more like a dart.

But in the hands of an experienced thrower, it can be quite the lethal weapon. And do we have any evidence from archaeology regards to the effectiveness of a weapon like that? You've got your atlatl, you've got your spear, you've got them combined together, and you're about to throw it, let's say, at a mammoth. Do we have any idea how much it would potentially do say, at a mammoth, do we have any idea how much it would potentially do any damage to a mammoth? There isn't a lot of archaeological evidence, but I found one

really fascinating discovery in a Pavlovian site in Poland, where they found a obsidian spearhead stuck into the bone of a mammoth, which just to make it past the skin can signify how deep this thing and how fast it would have had to been going to impact that deeply into the mammoth and certainly it wouldn't have been an individual sport it would have been the whole groups of people throwing lots of atlatls at a mammoth one one wouldn't have done it at all so definitely lots of people and in this particular site it was kind of a cul-de-sac so that it looks like they probably drove one mammoth into a dead end and then hurled their darts at it you mentioned a good point there cody of course the fact that the prehistoric hunter-gatherer communities how

everyone will have a role how it's so necessary for people to learn to hunt from a young age and then how of course if they're out hunting they'll be hunting in large groups so not to imagine one person with an asset but them to be in a massive group in regards therefore to hunting mammoths and you mentioned that cul-de-sac do we have any ideas how they would go about hunting a mammoth as you also highlighted this is this is an animal that's in herds do we have any idea how therefore they would be able to maybe isolate one of these one of these massive beasts yeah it looks like their camps were up on hills often and they'd be up above where the mammoths would would come in and into these river valleys and so they could watch them coming and then they would probably identify certainly female

mammoths not necessarily surprisingly small mammoths. The bones don't look like they were hunting sick or even old mammoths primarily, but certainly female mammoths. Male mammoths, bull mammoths can be dangerous, particularly when they're in a period called must, quite similar to elephants. They will attack anything. They will attack birds birds even trees sometimes so they probably wouldn't have been allow themselves to be

herded whereas a female mammoth might be because you need to of course trap it so that it can no longer run away so they would probably identify a large female mammoth try to herd it away get it away from the herd drive it away from the the herd into their sort of designated kill zone, which was in this Polish site is sort of, they're not cliffs, it's just a sort of on three sides that are sort of rock walls to prevent it from escaping. So then once they had it in there, we can, and then as far as how they attacked it, we can sort of take a lot of lessons from elephant hunters because their activities their sort of means would have been the same although their tools would have been quite different which is that the rear of a of an

elephant and probably of a mammoth was is basically impenetrable unfortunately for the hunters so you would have had to to face it and to face the massive tusks and uh throw your spear at a very angry very heavy animal because as soon as you throw in your spear that animal that massive beast is going to be absolutely pissed off with you and it's going to be charging right down at you it's really difficult just to imagine i mean hunting in that world in that environment you know the glacial maximum that we highlighted is so cold and you need this meat for your survival. And if you miss your shot or you miss throw your ass lateral and you've got a mammoth coming down towards you with tusks bearing down at you, you're as good as gone. It's a fascinating, well, horrific lifestyle to kind of envisage.

Yeah, I don't. I mean, we can see how they did it. But even when you know how they did it, but even when you know how they did it, it's sort of astonishing that they did. I mean, to do the research for this, I sort of read some accounts of African elephant hunters, and they describe the charge of an elephant as the scariest event of hunting any animal in Africa, including lions. It's simply terrifying and dangerous, even now with modern guns and high-powered elephant guns. So you can only imagine what it would have been like. And it's sort of funny that before they started finding these dart heads and spearheads in the bones of mammoth, there was a lot of

archaeologists who sort of wondered if these bones that they found in these human camps were simply scavenged. Even though they found massive amounts of these bones, they sort of still couldn't believe that they could hunt these creatures. You needed this sort of smoking gun that is clearly hunted creatures with these dart heads in their vertebrae and stuff before they could believe that this actually occurred. And it is actually extreme. And it's an extraordinary example from the ice age that you focused on in your book that we focused on in today's episode isn't it because it's the combining of this very difficult time in the ice age so 25 000 years ago alongside trying to live

this lifestyle against one of the biggest land animals in the region it's almost like you are combining two incredibly different difficult scenarios merging them together putting these people into that environment and saying right go for it try and survive it's it must have been a fascinating study to research when looking at life in the Ice Age. Yeah, you wouldn't believe it except for it happened, clearly. You wouldn't believe they survived. You wouldn't believe not only these cultures that survived on a range of large animals, but then this subculture of the Pavlovian that survived on specifically mammoths,

these mammoth hunting specialists. You sort of, like these archaeologists that first found these cultures, you only believe what they actually did as a sort of last resort when all else has been proven otherwise. It's otherwise just sort of impossible to imagine how they did it. Now, before we completely wrap up, are there any key messages that you'd like listeners to take away about surviving in the Ice Age? Let's say if we were thrown into Eastern Europe at this time, into the Pavlovian culture, any tips or any important words? hunt these mammoths if you're going to want to eat clearly. And I would say craft an atlatl,

which is not too difficult, fortunately, just a simple stick with a bone at the end to latch your dart onto. Get that obsidian sharpened and attached to the end of your dart, and then you're going to have to make sure to not go alone. You're going to have to be a team player and go with lots of other people, not just to help you throw the dart, but that the mammoth might chase instead of you. It sort of lowers your odds of being trampled. And then, unfortunately, when you trap the mammoth, don't trap more than one. And when you trap it, you're going to have to wait until it faces you to throw your dart. Otherwise, it will simply be useless. So throw your dart, and will simply be useless so throw your dart and uh hopefully it doesn't when it angers and charges which it will hopefully it doesn't charge after you well cody

this has been great of course this is just one chapter of your how to survive book we focused in on the ice age but you cover several other massive events from ancient history too don't you yeah i i spanned quite a lot of not just human history, but even a few before that. As I said, I'd like to focus on the sort of spectacular disasters that exemplify a period in history, and that there's something sort of deeper to say about them, either scientifically or historically, that I think so we not just learn about how to escape these these different disasters and what happened at that moment but sort of the events leading up

to them and sort of what the the results of what changed in human culture after them. Could we really survive the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs? Well this one I have to admit the experts I spoke with needed quite a bit of cajoling to even suggest that there was a chance. I mean, our ancestors, which this was 65, 66 million years ago, they survived and they were quite a bit different looking than us. Of course, they sort of resembled a shrew-like creature. In fact, no mammal larger than basically a raccoon survived the impact of this asteroid. So the chances of you surviving are limited, but I would suggest if you

were on the eastern hemisphere, the asteroid, which was about six miles wide and traveling at about 10 miles per second, impacted what is now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. And the force with which it impacted is almost unimaginable. It was sort of probably about 100 million times the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. So if you were in Texas, it would have killed you. If you were in even as far as New York, it would have deafened you. And if there had been any glass, it would have shattered it basically across the entire Western Hemisphere. And then, of course, there were tsunamis that were 1,000 feet high and across the Gulf Coast and even 600 feet high in Europe. And then after that, it got worse.

There's sort of all of this material that it ejected from the impact site. If you can imagine, it actually, at this pressure, sort of rock behaves a bit like a fluid. So it's sort of very similar actually to sort of a cannonball. Cannonball are hitting a pool on this sort of sploosh of earth that lifted up was about 25 trillion tons of rock and earth sort of at speeds that some of which exited our orbit but most of which fell back down to earth and as it did it sort of incinerated in the atmosphere and sort of fell as fiery chunks and it sort of basically ignited forest fires throughout the world which is the only dinosaurs that did survive were probably

the ground nesting birds because even birds that there was almost no forest left after the global firestorm and then even beyond that the most difficult part to survive would have been there's quite a bit of oil in the Yucatan and so this was vaporized and then spread about the stratosphere as a kind of black paint which took almost 10 years to come down because this was above the rain clouds and this black paint dropped sunlight by 90%. Global temperatures fell by an average of 50 degrees. So if you can imagine the ice age, they fell about 15. This was 50 and basically stopped all evaporation. So there was almost no rainfall. And so the only area in which um i think it would have been possible for for for a time for someone like us to survive would have been somewhere in in maybe indonesia inside a deep deep cave where it was near the equator it was still a livable temperature well there we go slight tangent on

the end but thank you for answering my question all about that as mentioned we focus more on the ice age today cody this has been great last but certainly not least the book you have written which covers all of these how to survive scenarios is called it's called how to survive history how to survive history and of course you've got a popular tiktok account too i believe oh yeah the last few months i've been sort of trying to make videos little explainers little quick one-minute explainers for different disasters sort of that I cover in the book all the way up to the Titanic and other talk about Pompeii surprisingly survivable had to survive ancient Egypt and darkest year of the Dark Ages so I try to make little one-minute explainers on in case anybody's curious how you could have survived events like that

absolutely right you know Pompeii if they got out early enough they could easily get clear the volcano but that is another story entirely cody it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today thank you for having me well there you go a slightly different episode to what we usually have on The Ancients, but let us know your thoughts. Let us know if you would like some more of these fun, how to survive themed episodes on The Ancients, and we may well do quite a few more in the future. We've got lots of ancient cultures to choose from after all.

Now, last things from me, you know what I'm going to say. If you have enjoyed The Ancients, you're enjoying the show, well, you can help us out by leaving us a lovely rating on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from. It's really easy and it does really help as we continue our everlasting mission to grow the podcast and to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.