How did Stone Age people survive winter?

The human race has been through some hard times since we’ve been around, but little comes close to the challenge of surviving through a Stone Age winter. Lacking any kind of proper clothing and having to live in homes made from sticks and animal skins, and all the while not even having pottery or sacks to store food in. So how did Stone Age people survive winter, and what exactly was the Stone Age?

(The wooly mammoth is the animal most closely associated with Stone Age hunters, and rightly so as a single mammoth could feed an entire village for weeks)

What and when was the Stone Age?

This era was named as such because of its defining technology, which was people’s ability to work stones into more useful shapes, such as tools and weapons. An age is named after the most advanced technology that people had that was useful, for example, it is likely that tin and lead would have been discovered shortly after our ancestors discovered fire almost 400,000 years ago because both have very low melting temperatures and could easily seep out of a rock lining a normal fire, but both are very soft and far too weak to make anything useful.

(The Stone Age ran through the Ice Age and during which, the British Isles were mostly covered in glaciers)

Flint was the only thing people had that was strong and sharp enough to work with, so the era was known as the Stone Age and lasted until the next biggest discovery of the human race, the invention of copper smelting. The copper age started in Britain around 3,500 BCE but only lasted 500 years until someone worked out how to create the alloy of bronze by combining both tin and copper, which made a material stronger than either of the metals alone.

Who lived during the Stone Age?

Humans, as we know them today, have only been around for just under 200,000 years, before this the world was inhabited by various species of Neanderthals and the ancestor species that modern-day humans evolved from. During this time everything was very primitive and our ancestors would have lived in a more animalistic fashion, likely not making shelters or wearing anything that could be classed as clothing.

After we evolved into having the same bodies as we do now, we still lived in the same very primitive fashion that those who came before us did, and we had to wait until around 50,000 BCE for our brains to evolve to the point where we had a better understanding of how to do things, leading to the first mass migration of the human race from the cradle of humanity.

How did people in the Stone Age survive through winter?

We can only speculate on the local temperatures throughout the Stone Age, which ran alongside the ice age until that ended around 11,500 BCE. The further north you went the colder it would be, and anything further north than the center of England would have been impossible to access due to the enormous glaciers. The highest single population in the world at the time were the civilizations that lived in the area known as Mesopotamia, but this was located mostly in modern-day Iraq and Syria and would have been much warmer during the winters, likely not even seeing snow.

(A preserved shoe from the Stone Age, made from leather and stitched together with leather lace)

Those in the northern regions and anyone living in Central Europe or above would see very harsh winters, made worse by the hundreds of miles of glaciers the northern winds would pass over before blasting people to the south.

The ice age in the British Isles is a good example of the most extreme it can get. Everything from the lake district and above, which is roughly the top half of the country would be impossible to access. The southern and central areas of England would be equivalent to a bad winter in Modern-day Iceland, but still survivable, even with the technology they had.

There have always been 3 main factors to ancient people surviving winter. Food, shelter, and warmth.

Stone age winter food

Everyone lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle throughout the stone age and most of their food would have been meat. One thing people don’t realize is that during the Stone Age, the population of the entire British Isles was only in the tens of thousands, and it wasn’t until the Iron Age which started around 800 BCE, that the population of Britain passed 1 million people for the first time. The vast majority of land would have been lush forests and open hills and plains, which were perfect breeding grounds for all the animals that greatly outnumbered humans.

This is why people didn’t bother to farm until the bronze age because they simply didn’t need to and could hunt animals that didn’t hibernate through the winter. One big advantage of hunting during the earlier years of the Stone Age was the size of some of the land mammals, like the wooly mammoth or rhino, but nothing was more popular to hunt than the Megalocerous, also known as the Irish Elk. These were just giant deer that stood over 10 feet tall and provided enough meat to feed a whole village for weeks.

(The Megalocerous was the highest prize for stone age hunters. Providing plenty of meat and skins, but without the dangers of fighting something like a mammoth or wooly rhino)

Pottery didn’t make it to Britain until around 4,000 BCE and metal was still a long way off, so it’s unclear how they would have stored and preserved food for the winter, but some ancient methods we know about from other cultures could shed some light. In Scandinavia it was common to see huge stick racks with hundreds of fish drying in the cold arctic air, this was done to create something called stockfish which is safe to eat for months but needs to be soaked in water for a few hours first. It’s also likely they would sow up meat and fat in large sacks made of animal skins, similar to how native Americans made pemmican.

Hazelnuts and acorns are both native to the UK and could be dried and processed into a type of ground nutmeal that would last for several months. It’s likely they used whatever edible grains they could find and dried them for the winter months, but because they didn’t have metal they also didn’t have the ability to make saws and nails, so even something as simple as a wooden box would have been out of their capabilities.

For the earlier years of the Stone Age, Hunting was the number one method of providing food, but in the later years just before someone worked out how to melt copper, other goods began to arrive in the British Isles. Wheat farming in the UK began around 5,000 BCE and quickly spread across the country to support the growing human populations, allowing people to mass produce all the food they needed for the winter without having to rely on animals.

Stone age clothing and homes

For the majority of the Stone Age, humans lived in homes made from stick frames and covered with animal skins. Many tribes were nomadic and built smaller homes they could easily move and rebuild as the animal herds migrated to new areas. From about 8,000 BCE, the first signs of thatching appeared and people began to make walls from stacking stone with a binding clay-like mixture in between to act as cement. These walls were often quite thick and couldn’t be built very high for stability reasons, but they provided the perfect base to build a thatched roof. These stone-walled homes were often built as small enclosed villages and had a perimeter wall that the individual homes would build into.

(The remains of a stone age dwelling, the clay mortar has long since washed out of the walls and we can only guess what the roof would have been like, but it gives an insight into their living conditions)

When it came to clothing the only option they had was animal skins. Wool could have been collected and spun into rough cordage, but it’s very unlikely they had the knowledge or equipment to spin it into usable thread. Animal skins would be turned into leather and worked so they softened up enough to make clothing. Boots would also be made of leather with the sole consisting of multiple layers stitched together, often from boiled and unworked leather so it was tougher.

Sowing equipment would be made from sharpened animal bones and the thread would most likely be the strong sinew threads from within the legs of deer or other similar animals. Leather strips were also used as a thread on boots but little clothing has survived from the Stone Age to give us a full understanding of their clothes.

One thing we do know is they didn’t start to farm on a large scale until around 4,000 BCE which was only 500 years before the first metal age began. Flax is the name of the plant that linen is made from, and this was one of the most popular crops grown at the end of the Stone Age, giving people the option of not having to kill a giant cow every time they wanted a new pair of trousers.

If food wasn’t a problem and your house wasn’t going to be blown down, then at least firewood wouldn’t be a problem. The vast wilderness would provide more firewood than you could burn and surviving a Stone Age winter would come down to simply just waiting it out.