Why Did Humans Survive the Ice Age When Bigger Animals Didn't?

Twenty thousand years ago a woolly mammoth stood on the northern steppe. Two layers of fur, a fat layer ten centimetres thick, small ears to reduce heat loss, and blood chemistry tuned for the cold. Standing nearby was something that weighed sixty kilograms, had almost no body hair, and had evolved in tropical Africa. Only one of them is still here. And it isn't the one built for the cold. The mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the cave bear, the giant Irish elk, the sabre-toothed cats — across Eurasia and the Americas, the large animals of the Ice Age disappeared. The thin, hairless, tropical primate walked out the other side and inherited the planet. This is why. The mammoth steppe was one of the largest ecosystems that has ever existed, and when it warmed, the grass that fed millions of large herbivores turned to bog and forest. A six-tonne animal needs 150 to 200 kilograms of vegetation a day, and its teeth were wrong for the new plants. Meanwhile humans, adapted for nothing in particular, ate everything: fish, birds, eggs, roots, nuts, marrow. We look at the eyed needles from Siberia around 40,000 years ago, the thousands of ivory beads sewn onto fitted clothing at Sungir, the dwellings built from mammoth bone at Mezhyrich in Ukraine, and the mammoths that survived on Wrangel Island until 4,000 years ago — long after the pyramids at Giza were built. Being perfectly adapted to the Ice Age was not an advantage. It was a trap. New videos on ancient humans and how we became who we are. Subscribe and hit the bell so you don't miss the next one.