Tasty stone age animals you just can’t buy at the shops anymore

Living in the Stone Age wouldn’t have exactly been fun or easy, with giant cave bears and mountain lions roaming the land and every task you do will be with wooden or stone tools. Everything about life was difficult in this era, and early humans didn’t have a very good understanding of things, lacking basics like pottery and fabric clothing from their lives.

The Stone Age ran from around 2.5 million B.C.E to between 9000 and 6000 B.C.E depending on where you were in the world. During the last ice age, the glaciers almost reached southern England, making everything a hundred miles south of this a nearly Arctic climate. The ice slowly retreated to the poles where it is now, but early man would have followed them north as new lands were uncovered, but they weren’t the first ones there.

(A selection of Stone Age hunting weapons)

Many strange and wonderful animals were able to withstand the cold better than humans could and were established in the frozen forests long before people migrated there. Hunting these creatures would provide a massive amount of meat and skins, but killing something as big as a wooly mammoth with a sharp stick wasn’t easy. Today, all of the main animals hunted in Stone Age Britain have long since gone extinct, but through excavations around the world we have rediscovered most of these amazing creatures and it shows some of the things that our ancestors would have eaten that died out long before we got here.

The Megaloceros

Also known as the Irish Elk, this giant deer was common across most of Europe and especially Ireland. It lived the exact same way that modern deer do but died out around 11,700 years ago apparently due to the ending of the ice age. There were various species of this type of giant deer but the Megaloceros was the most common and was the last of the species to die out.

The Woolly Rhino

The idea of a rhino living in the wild in the British countryside is something that seems like it would be impossible, but one thing most people forget when talking about the Stone Age is that it ran right through the Ice Age, with some of the daily winter temperatures close to that of northern Siberia. The Woolly rhino died out again due to climate change as its very thick skin and shaggy fur coat saw it overheat when the atmosphere began to heat up.

The Mammoth

No Stone Age animal list would be complete without mentioning the mammoth. Basically a giant elephant covered in a thick shaggy fur coat, they are almost the poster animal of the Stone Age. This is another one lost due to rising temperatures but has been found more than any other animal during excavations across Europe. The majority of them died out around 9,000 BCE when the climate became too hot for them to survive, but a small group managed to walk all the way across Russia until they ended up on Wrangel Island, north of the furthest eastern point of mainland Russia. They lived here in a small herd and survived until around 2,000 BCE when they all died presumably to climate change.

Cave Lion

One of the more dangerous wild animals during the Stone Age. All though they weren’t the biggest or strongest, they were stealthy and used surprise attacks when they could. It’s thought a cave lion would normally attack in the same way as South American jungle cats, which is jumping on the back of its prey from above and biting the back of the neck to crush the spinal column.

Cave Bear

Very low down on the tasty stone age animals list due to the danger involved. More powerful than a grizzly in terms of size and strength, the cave bear is one of the most dangerous animals to fight head-on during the Stone Age. Often standing over 10 feet tall when on their back legs and strong enough to slap a person’s spine in half, the cave bear is thought to have died out due to overhunting combined with dwindling populations from climate change. Fortunately, the people living in those times found that cave bears ate mostly plants and didn’t actively seek meat, so perhaps the overhunting was mostly due to fear or status symbols.

How did people in the Stone Age hunt?

Mankind has been around in its current form for almost 300,000 years, but it has only been in the last 50,000 years that our brains have developed enough to be able to understand more than the average chimpanzee. During the earlier years, humans didn’t understand how to use flint and ate all their meat raw, which they would hunt with pointy sticks and by throwing rocks. After flint and fire were discovered, hunting would take place in large groups using flint-topped spears and during the later Stone Age years, bows with flint arrows became more common.

Various other animals that existed in the Stone Age are still around today, though the country of origin has changed with many of them. Here’s a short list of some of the animals that have survived from the stone age:

Wolf, Bear, Hyena, Hippo, Wild Boar, sloth, crocodile, lion, horse, donkey, dogs, and a large selection of birds and smaller animals.