How did humans survive the last Ice Age?

The answer is both they didn’t and also we still are surviving an ice age. The earth has gone through five significant ice ages in its life, and during the time humans existed, we were not “humans” but one of the earlier Neanderthal or Homo erectus species, so we didn’t exist for most of it. The earth began to warm up starting about 12,000 BCE and since then the glaciers have retreated back to the north and south pole, but the ice age didn’t actually end.

(Huge moving ice sheets like this would have covered most of the northern hemisphere, slowly retreating over the years back to the north pole)

When an ice age happens, the world goes through hot and cold periods, but since an ice age can last for millions of years, these hot periods can last for tens of thousands of years. When the earth heated up and humanity flourished, this is only an interglacial period, and the world is guaranteed to get cold again when it ends, making the human race currently existing on a planet with an active ice age.

What did humans eat during the ice age?

The local wildlife would have been very different back then, with wooly mammoths and rhinos roaming the countryside. Mountain lions and cave bears would have been a constant threat, and avoiding huge packs of wolves would also be a priority, but all these animals also helped them survive. It is estimated from bones found at various dig sites, that a fully grown male woolly mammoth would weigh about 6 tons (6,000 kg). The amount of meat an animal like this would provide could feed an entire village for weeks, and provide enough skin to make clothes and shelters for a long time.

(A common sight during the Ice Age, and killing one would provide enough meat to feed a large village)

They lived purely hunter-gatherer lifestyles and were partially nomadic in nature. Certain animals don’t hibernate and would always be around somewhere, which often meant having to move camp a few miles to be able to live off the mammoth population there for a few months. Various types of wild grain, nuts, and seasonal fruit would be gathered throughout the year, but we can only guess at the methods they used to preserve food. It’s likely that the enormous amounts of fat from something like a mammoth could be kept for months if kept away from the air, but with such basic levels of technology, it’s likely they hunted throughout the year and lived off fresh food.

One thing they did have to work with was fire, as evidence of early control of fire by Homo erectus goes back 400,000 years. These fires would have always been started using flint which is easy to find and would have been on the surface in abundance.

How did people live during the ice age

The oldest shelter ever found built by humans is a mammoth bone circular tent-like structure in southwestern Russia. It is dated to be from around 25,000 BCE and appears to be the central building for the settlement that would have been there. Inventions like stacking stone with clay mortar, wattle and daub walls, and thatching were still a long way off, and so was the ability to effectively cut wood. This left them with little more to work with other than animal skins and branches, which are believed to have been the main home type for people living during the ice age.

(The remains of the mammoth bone structure, containing bones from dozens of wooly mammoths)

Caves were also used where they could be found, and evidence of people living in cave systems goes back as far as mankind does, with the oldest bones being found in Laos where part of a shin bone was found deep within a cave, and dated to be 86,000 years old. There are numerous findings across Europe from between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago that show people lived in caves for several generations, or until they had to move for whatever reason.

Dangers of surviving during the Ice Age

There was no such thing as medicine, and getting the smallest of infections could quickly turn deadly. Hunting was also a problem because bow technology was terrible and the strongest thing they had to top their spears with was flint. Even though this material is very sharp and strong enough to kill, it has to be thrown by someone close enough to an angry 6-ton mammoth. It would also take a lot of spears to get through the thick coat and several feet of fat and muscle before reaching something that can actually kill it, making hunting a very dangerous but necessary activity.

Other animals like the cave bear would likely be even more dangerous to deal with, and there were other wild creatures that would actively hunt humans, like the mountain lion or large packs of wolves. The human population at the end of the ice age was only around 1 million people globally, so a country like the UK would be shared by no more than 20,000 people. This led to an enormous expanse of wilderness that allowed the animals that lived there to flourish, many of which didn’t have any natural predators. Humans were very much outnumbered by everything in the wild and being forced to deal with these dangers on a daily basis was a very real problem.