7 Disturbing Things Ice Age Humans Did to Survive Winter

In the Ice Age, you could eat meat every day and still starve to death. You could sleep inside walls made from dead mammoths. And in one cave, people turned human skulls into cups. These are 7 disturbing truths about how our ancestors survived winter, from boiling bones for fat and burning skeletons for heat, to the mystery of the missing fingers on a cave wall in France. Stay to the end and pick your theory in the comments. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 The strangest clue: a cave full of hands 0:39 How cold was the Ice Age? 1:27 Truth 1: Eating meat every day… and starving 3:24 Truth 2: They burned bones to survive the night 4:46 Truth 3: Houses built from mammoth bones 6:12 Truth 4: The frozen road to America 7:46 Truth 5: Did early humans hibernate? 9:10 Truth 6: The missing fingers 11:02 Truth 7: The skull cups of Gough's Cave 12:28 All 7 truths 13:06 The Ice Age never really ended 👇 Which theory did you pick for the missing fingers: frostbite, ritual or secret code? 📚 SOURCES ▸ Tierney et al. (2020), "Glacial cooling and climate sensitivity revisited", Nature: global cooling at the Last Glacial Maximum ▸ "Rabbit starvation" (protein poisoning): accounts of 19th-century explorers and northern trappers ▸ Bone-grease rendering and bone as fuel: zooarchaeological studies of Upper Paleolithic sites, incl. Kostenki, Russia ▸ Pryor et al. (2020), Antiquity: the Kostenki 11 mammoth-bone circle (~25,000 years old, 60+ mammoths) ▸ Mezhyrich, Ukraine: mammoth-bone dwellings (~18,000 years old) ▸ Bennett et al. (2021), Science: human footprints at White Sands, New Mexico (21,000–23,000 years old) ▸ Bartsiokas & Arsuaga (2020), L'Anthropologie: the hibernation hypothesis at Sima de los Huesos, Spain ▸ Gargas Cave, France: hand stencils (~27,000 years old), first described by Félix Regnault (1906) ▸ Bello et al. (2011), PLoS ONE: the skull cups of Gough's Cave, England (~15,000 years old) 🎨 Animated by Roko Explains. New prehistory stories every week, so subscribe so you don't miss the next one. #iceage #prehistory #ancienthumans #survival #history #archaeology #neanderthal #mammoth #caveart #explained