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Every video in this series has ended by leaving those people out there on the tundra, alive, competent, getting on with it. This one is about what happened to them. Because the Ice Age ended, and it did not end gently, and it did not end for everyone in the same way. Start with the thing that surprises people most. It was fast. We can read the temperature of the past out of Greenland ice. Snow falls, buries the snow beneath it, and the chemistry of each layer records how warm the air was when it fell. Drill down through two miles of that and you have a year-by-year record going back well past the last Ice Age. And what that record shows is not a slow, gentle thaw over thousands of years. It shows sudden jumps. Around fourteen thousand seven hundred years ago the northern hemisphere warmed sharply, by something in the order of ten degrees, in a span of decades rather than millennia. Forests began moving north. Then, around twelve thousand nine hundred years ago, it slammed back into the cold. That reversal has a name: the Younger Dryas. It lasted about twelve hundred years, and for the people living through it, the world they had grown up in simply returned. And then, about eleven thousand seven hundred years ago, it ended, and this is the part that is genuinely hard to take in. The ice core evidence indicates the warming at the end of the Younger Dryas happened extremely quickly, on the order of a decade or a few decades for much of the change. A person could be born into an ice age and grow old in a different world. Not their descendants. Them. So what did that actually do to Europe? It killed the steppe. We have spent this whole series on the mammoth steppe, that vast open grassland with the ice on the horizon. It existed because the climate was cold and, crucially, dry. Dry cold produces grass. Grass, in enormous quantity, feeds enormous herds. Warm it up and add moisture, and grass loses. Birch comes in, then pine, then oak and hazel and lime. Within a few thousand years, most of Europe, which had been open to the horizon in every direction, was covered in dense forest. That is not a nicer version of the same place. For the animals of the steppe, it was the end of the world. A mammoth needs a colossal amount of grass every day. A woolly rhino, the same. When the grass fragments into scattered patches and then vanishes, the herds do not adapt. They shrink, they split into isolated populations, and isolated populations of very large, slow-breeding animals are extremely fragile. Now, the question everyone asks: was it the climate that killed the mammoths, or was it us? The honest answer, and the one most researchers now hold, is both, and the order matters. The warming destroyed the habitat and broke the great herds into small, separated groups. Human hunters then applied pressure to populations that had no capacity left to absorb it. Neither alone explains the pattern. Together they do. And the mammoths did not vanish in a single dramatic moment. They retreated, and they hung on. Woolly mammoths disappeared from most of mainland Europe by around fourteen thousand years ago. But a small population survived on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia, cut off when the sea rose. And they lived there until about four thousand years ago. Which means that when the Great Pyramid of Giza was being built, there were still mammoths alive on Earth. They outlasted the Ice Age by seven thousand years and nobody in Egypt ever knew. Meanwhile, the sea was coming. All that melting ice went somewhere. Sea levels rose roughly a hundred and twenty metres, and Doggerland, the dry plain where the North Sea now is, went under. Not overnight, but relentlessly, over generations. Rivers backed up. Marshes turned brackish. Camps that had been used for centuries became coastline and then seabed. Around eight thousand two hundred years ago the last of it went, and Britain became an island. That was somebody's homeland. There are families whose grandparents' camps are now under sixty metres of the North Sea. So what happened to the people? They did not die out. That is the first and most important thing. They changed. You cannot hunt a forest the way you hunt a steppe. There are no herds of a thousand reindeer moving on a schedule. There are red deer, wild boar and aurochs, alone or in small groups, hidden behind trees. So the toolkit changed. Bows and small, sharp flint microliths that could be set into arrows. Dogs, which are far more useful in woodland than on open ground. Boats and fish traps and nets, because rivers, lakes and the new coastlines were suddenly full of food. Axes, because for the first time in human history in Europe, there were trees everywhere and you needed to cut through them. Archaeologists call this period the Mesolithic. And we have a place where you can see it happening. At Star Carr, in Yorkshire in northern England, people camped by a lake about eleven thousand years ago, right at the start of the new world. They built a wooden platform at the water's edge, one of the oldest structures known in Britain. They left behind a house floor. And they left something stranger: red deer skulls with the antlers still attached, trimmed and thinned to make them lighter, with holes cut through the bone. Twenty-one of them. Nobody knows for certain what they were for. A hunting disguise is one idea. Something worn in a ceremony is another. But somebody sat by that lake and carefully hollowed out a deer's skull so it could be worn on a human head. And then there is the question of who these people actually were, which we could not answer at all until very recently. In 1903, a skeleton was found in Gough's Cave in the Cheddar Gorge. The same cave as the skull cups from an earlier video, but a much later burial. He is about ten thousand years old, and he is the oldest near-complete modern human skeleton from Britain. He is called Cheddar Man. In 2018, a team from the Natural History Museum and University College London got a genome out of his skull. And the results changed how a lot of people picture their own ancestors. Cheddar Man had blue eyes. And his DNA indicated dark to very dark skin. That combination surprises people, but it should not. Pale skin in Europe is recent. It spread widely with later populations, including the farmers who arrived from Anatolia and with later migrations from the steppe. Ten thousand years ago in Britain, the hunter-gatherer people of Europe were dark-skinned and often light-eyed. Cheddar Man was not an isolated oddity. He belongs to a population that the ancient DNA work of Cosimo Posth's team and others has traced right across the continent: the hunter-gatherers who came out of the Ice Age refuges and repopulated Europe as the ice pulled back. And here is how it ends. About eight thousand years ago, farmers began arriving in Europe from Anatolia, bringing wheat, barley, sheep, goats and a completely different way of living. Over the following two thousand years the hunter-gatherer world was overtaken. Not entirely wiped out; the genetics shows mixing, in different proportions in different regions, over a long period. But the way of life ended. The people of the mammoth steppe did not disappear. They were absorbed. Which means that if you have European ancestry, some fraction of your genome, small but real, comes directly from them. From people who read the coming of winter in the flight of geese. Who slept in a house made of mammoth bones. Who sat around a fire and listened to an old woman tell a story. Who ground cattail roots into flour. Who scratched a river onto a stone so somebody else would find their way. Who kept a sick puppy alive because they could not bear to let it die. They are not a separate species, or a rehearsal for us, or a cautionary tale. They are simply the people this continent had before it had anything else. And they were, on the whole, extremely good at being alive. So that is how the Ice Age ended. But it is nowhere near the end of what these people left behind, because we have not yet talked about the paintings. Next time on Ice Age Europe: the caves. Who actually made the art, how they got half a kilometre underground with a fat lamp, and what the handprints on the wall tell us that nothing else does. Subscribe, and I will see you there.
