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There is an animal in your house right now, or in your neighbour's house, that is descended from something that used to eat people. Hold that thought. We will come back to it, and it is going to be the best part of this. Because for most of human history in Europe, we were not at the top of anything. We think of the Ice Age as people hunting mammoths. That is true, but it is only half the picture, and it is the comfortable half. The other half is that Ice Age Europe was full of animals that were bigger than you, faster than you, better armed than you, and could see in the dark. You went outside at night into that. Every night. So who exactly was out there, and what did the people actually do about it? Let us start with the one that sat at the top. The cave lion. Its scientific name is Panthera spelaea, and it was not a small thing that got exaggerated over time. It was roughly ten per cent larger than a modern African lion, which puts a big male at something like three hundred kilos and two and a half metres of body before you count the tail. It ranged across the whole continent, from Spain to Siberia. And here is the wonderful part. We know what it looked like, in detail, because people who saw it drew it. In the Chauvet cave in the Ardeche in southern France there is a panel with more than seventy lions on it, drawn around thirty-six thousand years ago. They are not decorative. They are observed. The artists drew a group of lions hunting together, heads low, shoulders forward, eyes locked on something outside the picture. And the males have no manes. For a long time nobody was sure whether the European cave lion had a mane or not, and the answer came from people who had stood close enough to check. Think about that for a moment. Somebody who had watched a pride of cave lions hunt then walked into a cave with a torch and drew what they had seen, well enough that thirty-six thousand years later a zoologist can use it as evidence. Then there was the cave bear. Ursus spelaeus. Bigger than any bear alive in Europe today, with large males reaching four hundred to five hundred kilos, and some estimates running higher. The name comes from the fact that we find them in caves by the thousand, because caves are where they hibernated, and hibernation is where a lot of them died. Which created a very specific problem. Because caves are also where people wanted to be. A dry cave with a good entrance is the best real estate of the Ice Age. It is shelter, it is defensible, it keeps the wind off. And every autumn, an animal weighing half a tonne came looking for exactly the same thing. In cave after cave across Europe, archaeologists find layers of human occupation and layers of bear occupation stacked on top of each other, alternating, over thousands of years. Humans in, bears out. Bears in, humans out. That is not a war. That is a very long, very slow argument about property. And then, in the dark, there was the third one, and honestly it is the one I would least like to meet. The cave hyena. Crocuta crocuta spelaea, the Ice Age subspecies of the spotted hyena, and unlike the cartoon version, this was not a scavenger waiting for scraps. Spotted hyenas are formidable hunters that work in clans, and the Ice Age version was larger than the ones alive today. They dragged carcasses back to dens, and those dens are now some of the richest bone deposits in European archaeology, because a hyena den preserves what a hyena ate. And in some of those dens, mixed in with the horse and the reindeer and the bison, there are human bones. Bones with hyena tooth marks on them. Now, that does not automatically mean people were being hunted and killed. A hyena will happily take a body that is already dead, and often did. But it settles one question. To the animals of Ice Age Europe, a human being was, at minimum, meat. There is no version of this story where our ancestors were left alone out of respect. So what did they do about it? The first answer is the obvious one. Fire, numbers, shelter, and never being alone. But there is a second answer, and it is the thing that separates us from every other prey animal that ever lived. They went after the predators. In the Lower Gallery of a cave called La Garma, in Cantabria in northern Spain, a Spanish team led by Marian Cueto studied a small group of cave lion bones. Nine toe bones, phalanges, found together inside what appears to be a dwelling structure. And they were covered in cut marks. The pattern of the cuts is the giveaway. This is not butchery for meat; there is barely any meat on a lion's toes. These are the marks a skinner makes when they are removing a pelt and taking great care to leave the claws attached to it. Somebody killed a cave lion, skinned it, kept the claws in the skin, and brought that skin into the place where they lived. That is not survival. That is a statement. Somebody wore, or laid out, or displayed the skin of the most dangerous animal on the continent, with the claws still in it, in the room where they slept. And you see the same thing in the art. In a cave in southern Germany called Hohlenstein Stadel, in the Lonetal valley, somebody carved a figure out of mammoth ivory around forty thousand years ago. It is about thirty centimetres tall. It has the body of a standing human and the head of a cave lion. It took, by modern experimental estimate, hundreds of hours of work with flint tools. The oldest known figurative sculpture in the world, made by people who lived among lions, is a person becoming a lion. Not a person killing one. Becoming one. But the real ending to this story is not about the animals people fought. It is about the one that came the other way. In February 1914, quarry workers in Oberkassel, just outside Bonn in Germany, blasted into a grave. Inside were two people, an older man and a younger woman, buried together around fourteen thousand years ago. And with them, deliberately placed, was a dog. The dog was a puppy. It died at about seven and a half months old, and it stood roughly forty to fifty centimetres at the shoulder. For decades that was the whole story: the oldest confirmed domestic dog in the world, buried with its people. Then a team including the veterinary researcher Luc Janssens went back and examined the teeth and bones properly, and published what they found in 2018. The puppy had been very sick. Its teeth showed enamel damage and the pattern of tooth loss and gum disease that follows a serious viral infection, almost certainly canine distemper, contracted at around nineteen weeks old. It survived at least two, possibly three separate bouts of the illness. That does not happen by itself. In modern dogs, distemper kills roughly three quarters of puppies that get it without veterinary care. A sick puppy in that state cannot hunt, cannot keep up, cannot feed itself, and produces nothing whatsoever of value to a group of hunter-gatherers living on the edge. It needs to be kept warm, given water, cleaned up after, and fed, for weeks. Somebody did that. Fourteen thousand years ago, in the cold, with no medicine, somebody nursed a useless, dying puppy through a disease that should have killed it, twice. And when it died anyway, they put it in a grave with two human beings. That animal's ancestors were wolves. Wolves were, alongside the lions and the hyenas, one of the things you listened for outside the shelter at night. So here is where the Ice Age leaves us. For tens of thousands of years, Europeans lived among animals that could kill them, and they did not simply hide from them. They watched them closely enough to record that the lions had no manes. They took the pelts and kept the claws in. They carved themselves into the shape of the predator, in ivory, over hundreds of hours. And then, at the very end of the Ice Age, they took the most dangerous social carnivore in the northern hemisphere and made it into something that slept next to them and got nursed when it was ill. That is not the story of a species that was afraid. The animal in your house is a wolf that somebody decided to look after. It has been about fourteen thousand years, and we are still doing it. Next time on Ice Age Europe: what they actually ate, and why almost everything you have heard about the caveman diet is wrong. Subscribe, and I will see you there.
