The stone age is named as such because it was a time before any kind of metal was utilised and the most advanced material on the planet was a piece of flint. All types of weapons and tools would have been made from either flint or wood, and it goes without saying that they weren’t exactly good.
When most people think of the stone age they normally imagine a group of loin cloth wearing hairy individuals clumped together in a cave. This isn’t entirely inaccurate as they were know to live in caves but the majority of stone age people lived in homes they built themselves, and although incredibly primitive they were more capable than you’d think.
A stone age winter would have been spent the same way people always have and always will spend winters, indoors with plenty of supplies. When it comes to surviving a stone age winter the most important factor would have been stockpiling some kind of preservable food, most likely nuts or wild grain.
The stone age was a time when people lived in hunter-gatherer groups, and the world would have been very different during those days. In modern day England you cant walk for more than 10 minutes without seeing a town or village, and even the country side is littered with farm houses and roads. In the stone age the opposite would have been try, the entire country would be one big forest broken up by hills and plains, and you could walk for days without seeing a single sign of human life.
Animals would have roamed the land in great herds and wild fruit and nut trees would have been plentiful. If you went into the biggest forest in your country and tried to survive off nothing but what you could gather, you’d most likely be dead in a few weeks, but in the stone age this is how everyone would have lived.
Preparing for winter would just mean more gathering during the fall, with as much food stockpiled as they possibly could in homes covered with skins and made from rock and clay walls. Hunting during the winter would also be an option, as animals like the Irish Elk would be plentiful and easy to track and see in the snow. The Irish Elk is basically a giant deer, standing well over ten feet tall including the antlers and would probably give off as much meat as a large bull.
Sitting in a stone hut with an animal skin roof and eating nothing but baked acorn mush and smoked Elk wouldn’t exactly be pleasant, but its better than starving. There’s also no indication as to what they did with the wild grain they gathered, but most presumably they knew how to make bread and cereal soups.
Since stone age people didn’t have anything close to a written language we can only speculate on how life must have been like for them, but if people did huddle together in a cave with nothing but a single animal skin on like they do in so many pictures, we probably wouldn’t have made it as a race through a single winter.
