The Ice Age

Think of the Ice Age and tales of ferocious sabre-toothed tigers and giant megafauna likely spring to mind - but what do we know about prehistoric human culture 25,000 years ago and how people survived a perilous landscape of marauding Woolly Mammoths, bitterly cold temperatures and primitive Stone Age tools? Tristan Hughes is joined by Cody Cassidy to look at how early cultures adapted to the extremes of the Last Glacial Period. Looking at the rapidly changing landscape, the cause of the big freeze and prehistoric hunting methods - do you have what it takes to survive the Ice Age? This episode was first released in October 2023. MORE Ice Age Britain: Finding the First Homo sapiens Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ice-age-britain-finding-the-first-homo-sapiens/id1520403988?i=1000645618843 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4u19HuMXM6JlicPr8FGok3 Ice Age America Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/mm/podcast/ice-age-america/id1520403988?i=1000677472289 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4KZruCMwpO7TakuiMs7DMp Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the Headline Hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 1:08Tristan Hughes?

  Hello, I hope you're doing well and are enjoying the festive period. Wishing you, once again, wishing you a very Merry Christmas as we get nearer also now to New Year and 2026, where we have got some very exciting episodes lined up for you. Cannot wait to share them, but you're gonna have to wait a little longer because the Ancients team are still enjoying their holidays. I've tried to rein them back in, but they're on strike. They're saying, no, they're saying, Tristan, we deserve our holiday. Stop being so cruel. Stop making us listen to your voice all the time, again and again and again. And I've had to give in. So we are doing another episode from the archive today. This is one which we released over two years ago now. It was incredibly popular at the time, and I can understand why.

• 1:52Tristan Hughes?

  This was from our How to Survive series. Once in a while, we do do an episode in the format of How to Survive in Ancient Rome or Babylonia. This one, we went a bit bigger. We did how to survive the Ice Age, which is a pretty massive topic to try and cover. But within that, we then focused in on what do we know about early humans surviving in a very difficult geographical region of the Ice Age more than 20,000 years ago. And in particular, we looked at this culture known as the, wait for it, the Pavlovian culture in Central Europe, more than 20,000 years ago, they hunted mammoths and had a fascinating

• 2:32Tristan Hughes?

  culture. And to talk through it all, we have the author Cody Cassidy on the show. Cody, he dialed in from the United States. This was a really fun chat and it was, I had a very popular reception when we released it first time around. So popular, in fact, that we're re-releasing it today. I really hope you guys enjoy. It's cold, it's December, unless you're in Australia or New Zealand, where it's really hot, you've got Christmas on the barbecue and all that kind of stuff. But if you're not in the Southern Hemisphere, it's cold, a bit Ice Agey feels. Why not do an episode? Why not re-release this episode at this time? I'm rambling on for too long now. Let's go.

• 3:15Tristan Hughes?

  Cody, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today, buddy.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 3:19Tristan Hughes?

  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, well, the Ice Age that we're talking about today, all the way to more recent deadly events too.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  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 forty thousand 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.

• 4:14Tristan Hughes?

  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 off, when you're looking at these topics, you say you start with Tyrannosaurus rex, so down in dinosaur times, I mean, why did you decide the Ice Age is another one of these topics to cover?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  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

• 5:18Speaker 02

  sticks and stones as weapons could bring down a mammoth, which seems impossible and impossibly dangerous.

• 5:26Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, absolutely, and we're gonna 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?

• 5:48Speaker 02

  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 hemisphere 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 as sort of fern-forested beaches. But I became interested in why, three million years ago,

• 6:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:57Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, absolutely, mate. Yeah, let's go into the weeds. Absolutely, let's delve right into it.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  OK, 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, of course, rock creation. That occurs 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

• 7:45Speaker 02

  that humans have released, all of humans have released. In that one, 75% of the species died. So we are in the process of something similar to that.

• 7:54Tristan Hughes?

  And so if we go from 200 million years ago to that other date which you hinted at, which you highlighted earlier, which was 3 million years ago, which seems to be like the beginning of the Ice Age, what is this massive event that seems to occur around there, which really almost triggers this great shift?

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Right, so 3 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, 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 ocean and the atmosphere, into vast beds of limestone rock primarily.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  So, 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, 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.

• 9:29Tristan Hughes?

  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, science is not by my background, but facts like that just absolutely astonish me.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:09Tristan Hughes?

  What's also interesting about this is that when you're thinking 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.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  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, like a spinning top. And these wobbles occur on 40,000 year cycles. So we sort of, 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.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  It's far less significant than that. But what it does do is change ocean currents. And the, and these ocean currents, because carbon can be sequestered in the, 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 is, 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. It was about, temperature was about 15 degrees on average, cooler back then than it is now. And of course, massive glaciation.

• 11:48Tristan Hughes?

  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 step, which I know you focused in on, on your book, Eastern Europe today. Now, what did this area of the world look like 25,000 years ago?

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Yes, it's quite difficult to imagine. So glaciers or ice sheets, basically, were covering all of Northern Europe, Scandinavia. These are as high as skyscrapers, sometimes even, 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 a different effects to it because the massive ice sheets sort of blocked moisture from, from the Atlantic. So rainfall was, it 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.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  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 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 rhinoceruses. But you also had cheetah and other animals that we would think of as living in hot African deserts or savanna. So it was a kind of a familiar but unfamiliar landscape.

• 13:22Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Yes, cave bears and woolly rhinoceruses. And of course, the the big woolly mammoth, which I really became interested in. And just because it was such an unbelievably powerful creature that humans somehow hunted.

• 13:41Tristan Hughes?

  And who can blame you? Apart from maybe some of the dinosaur species, I think of all extinct species in the world. I mean, the woolly mammoth is the one that gave you 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?

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Well, call them the Gravititon culture. The 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 the 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-cheekbone 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.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:20Tristan Hughes?

  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 maximums in 25,000 years ago.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  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, or 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 sort of presume that this was like a parka-like clothing. And then, of course, there's bone needles too, that signify perhaps sewing.

• 16:15Tristan Hughes?

  Now, you mentioned Gravettian culture, but what about the Pavlovian culture? What is this in regards to it?

• 16:21Speaker 02

  This is, yeah, a subset of the Gravettitan 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, and what is now Poland. And in some of their camps, they have, they're sort of 98% 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.

• 16:49Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, they just, they'll 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, a massive, massive amount of bones and, and nearly all of them. Some cases, virtually all of them are mammoth. So it looks like they were just, like I said, mammoth hunting specialists.

• 17:27Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 17:35Speaker 02

  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, at this last, so they had to, must have had to use probably their bones for even their fires. You certainly would have had to cook the meat. And without much wood, they could have used their bones to cook their food. And small 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.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of the best one yet. Behind every episode, there's research, email, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 18:51Speaker 03

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• 19:51Tristan Hughes?

  So let's go on to hunting one of these mammoths. What sorts of weapons there for, of sticks and stones? What weapons are we talking about?

• 19:59Speaker 02

  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've found some of these ancient hunting sites and they used primarily spears, but not spears that we would commonly think of. This is not, 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 been, turned a dangerous activity into absolute suicide. So what they used are these, what they call atlatals 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, as if you've seen those tennis ball throwers, which if you pick up

• 20:44Speaker 02

  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, some, it looks more like a dart. But it, in the hands of an experienced thrower, can be quite the lethal weapon.

• 21:13Tristan Hughes?

  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 any damage to a mammoth?

• 21:31Speaker 02

  There isn't a lot of archaeological evidence, but I found one really fascinating discovery in a Pavlovian site in Poland, where they found an 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's sport. It would have been the whole groups of people throwing lots of atlatals at a mammoth. 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.

• 22:16Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned a good point there, Cody, of course, of the fact of 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 in a saddle, 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?

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, it looks like their camps are up on hills often, and they'd be up above where the mammoths would, would come and, 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 are, can be dangerous, particularly when they're in a period called must, quite similar to elephants. They'll attack anything. They'll attack birds, even trees sometimes. So they probably wouldn't have been, allowed themselves to be herded, whereas a female

• 23:35Speaker 02

  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 herd into their, their sort of designated kill zone, which was in, in this Polish site is sort of, they're not cliffs, it's, it's just, it's just a, a sort of, on three sides, there are sort of rock walls to prevent it from, from escaping. So then, once they had it in there, we can, and then as far as how they, 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

• 24:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:33Tristan Hughes?

  Cause as soon as you throw in your spear, that animal, that massive beast is gonna be absolutely pissed off with you and it's gonna 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, the regalia, it's so cold and you 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 it's a fascinating, well horrific lifestyle to kind of envisage.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't, I mean, we can see how they did it, but even that 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 uh elephant hunters and and they describe. The the charge of an of an elephant is the scariest event of hunting any animal in 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 and the bones of of mammoth, there was a lot of archaeologists who sort of wondered. If these bones that they found in these mammoth in these these human camps were simply scavenged.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:05Tristan Hughes?

  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, say twenty five thousand 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.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, you wouldn't believe it, except for it happened, clearly, you know, just, you wouldn't believe they survived, you wouldn't believe that 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, it's, 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.

• 27:24Tristan Hughes?

  Has it been interesting, when you were doing this research, comparing, let's say, the Pavlovian culture compared to other Graviton cultures in, let's say, surviving in that part of the world, or maybe in Western Europe, and looking for maybe similarities, but also differences in their hunting, in their lifestyles?

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Graviton, this was a cross-Europe culture, so the ones living on the seashore hunted more sea life, and the others hunted more reindeer. It is kind of remarkable the, how static these cultures were, though, over such long periods of time. I mean, the Graviton, this is from basically thirty-three thousand years ago to twenty-one thousand years ago. This is more than ten thousand years of a culture that used similar types of art. I mean, if we can think about our cultures, it's sort of thinking about ten thousand years and the differences that, that occur over this, this stretch of time, it's, uh, it's staggering. I mean, that spans before, before writing, so it's sort of a remarkable

• 28:22Speaker 02

  stasis these cultures existed in, art and lifestyles for massive amounts of periods of time, and large distances as well.

• 28:30Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Well, all I can say is that you're gonna have to, to hunt these mammoth if you're gonna wanna 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 on to. 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 not just to help you throw the dart, but that the mammoth might chase instead of you. Sort of lowers your 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 till it faces you to throw your dart.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Otherwise, it will simply be useless. So throw your dart and hopefully it doesn't. When it angers and charges, which it will, hopefully it doesn't charge after you.

• 29:41Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I I I spanned quite a lot of not just human history, but even a few before that. As I said, this I'd like to 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.

• 30:24Tristan Hughes?

  Could we really survive the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs?

• 30:28Speaker 02

  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 sixty five, sixty six 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 of this asteroid. So the chances of you surviving are limited, but I would I would suggest if you were on the eastern hemisphere, the asteroid, which was about six miles wide and and traveling at about ten miles per second, impacted the what is now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. And the force with which it impacted is almost unimaginable.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  It was 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 across the Gulf Coast and even 600 feet high in Europe. And then after that, it got worse. There's all of this material that it ejected from the impact site. If you can imagine, it actually, at this pressure, rock behaves a bit like a fluid. So it's very similar, actually, to a cannonball. Cannonballer hitting a pool. And the sploosh of earth that lifted up was about 25 trillion tons of rock and earth

• 31:55Speaker 02

  at speeds that, some of which exited our orbit, but most of which fell back down to earth. And as it did, it incinerated in the atmosphere and fell as fiery chunks and basically ignited forest fires throughout the world, which is the only dinosaurs that did survive are probably the ground nesting birds, because even birds, there was almost no forests 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%.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  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 I think it would have been possible for someone like us to survive would have been somewhere in And maybe Indonesia inside a deep, deep cave where it was near the equator, it was still a livable temperature.

• 33:07Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 33:20Speaker 02

  It's called How to Survive History.

• 33:22Tristan Hughes?

  How to Survive History. And of course, you've got a popular TikTok account too, I believe?

• 33:27Speaker 02

  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, I 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.

• 33:54Tristan Hughes?

  You're absolutely right. Pompeii, if they got out early enough, they could easily get clear of 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.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 34:09Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Cody Cassidy for that fun chat about how to survive in the Ice Age, especially if you were part of the Pavlovian culture. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you for listening. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Now, don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's go.o.gle/workspacewithGemini.