Life in a Mammoth Bone House | Ice Age Sleep Story

🎧 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0ISZ8Pn... Eighteen thousand years ago, on a frozen plain in what is now Ukraine, a family spent the winter in a round house built from the bones of mammoths. No trees, no metal, no pottery, only fire, fur, bone and each other. This is the slow, gentle story of one Ice Age winter at Mezhyrich: the last hunt of autumn, a house made of mammoths, fire without trees, needles and furs, the frozen larder, music on the steppe, how they really slept, the longest night, and at last the thaw. CHAPTERS 0:00 Bone and Snow 6:02 The World Eighteen Thousand Years Ago 11:27 The Mammoths 17:19 How We Know 22:54 The People 28:47 The Last Hunt of Autumn 35:54 A House Made of Mammoths 41:31 Fire Without Trees 46:46 Foxes, Furs and Needles 53:19 The Frozen Larder 58:19 Not Only Meat 1:02:52 First Snow and the Short Days 1:06:45 A Working Day That Is Not Long 1:11:30 Children of the Ice Age 1:17:05 When Darkness Falls 1:22:32 Stories and Stars 1:27:28 Music on the Steppe 1:31:27 How They Really Slept 1:36:51 Amber, Shells and Red Ochre 1:42:02 The Longest Night 1:46:24 The Lean Weeks 1:51:09 Storm Days 1:55:59 A Birth in Winter 2:00:43 Sickness and Care 2:05:48 Neighbours Across the Snow 2:09:49 Far to the West: The Painted Caves 2:16:47 Wolves at the Edge of the Camp 2:20:37 The Thaw 2:24:37 The Puppy of Oberkassel No sudden loud sounds. A small campfire and a soft wind murmur quietly in the background the whole way through. The family in this story (Ama, Tor, Sela, Lio, little Ren and the old uncle) are imagined, so that the story has people to follow. Everything around them follows what archaeologists know about the mammoth bone houses of Mezhyrich and Ice Age life on the East European plain. The age of about 18,000 years comes from new radiocarbon dating published in 2025 (Chu et al.). Where scientists still disagree, the story says so. Sources include: Chu et al. 2025 (Mezhyrich dating); Pidoplichko and Soffer on the Mezhyrich dwellings; Conard et al. on the Hohle Fels and Geissenklösterle flutes; Yetish et al. 2015 on sleep in hunter gatherer groups; Gurven and Kaplan 2007 on hunter gatherer lifespans; Janssens et al. 2018 on the Bonn-Oberkassel dog. Which story should I tell next? A night in Pompeii, a winter in a Viking hall, life on the Silk Road, or something else. Tell me in the comments. Narration, images and background sound are AI-generated.