How Ice Age Humans Survived Winter, Explained by a Caveman

How did cavemen survive winter? Ice age humans faced cold that should have killed them, and survived with fire, needles and mammoth bone houses. Take away your heating, your jacket and your fridge. Now survive a winter at the peak of the last ice age, with a body that was built for the African heat. For hundreds of thousands of years, every winter could kill. Here are the five enemies our ancestors had to beat to see spring, and the clever, strange and sometimes disgusting ways they did it: fat-burning bone fires, bear-skin clothing, the 40,000-year-old sewing needle, houses built from mammoth bones, cold-trap doorways, frozen food stores, crowded shelters and bodies that ran hotter. And a controversial idea that some early humans may have survived by hibernating. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 Take your heating away 0:53 The coldest world humans ever faced 1:16 A tropical body in an ice age 1:54 Enemy 1: The cold air 2:31 Enemy 2: The wind 2:58 The invention that changed everything 3:31 Enemy 3: The night 4:13 The cold-trap door and snow walls 4:51 Enemy 4: Hunger 6:02 Enemy 5: Being alone 6:43 Bodies that ran hotter 7:09 Did early humans hibernate? 8:05 How we beat winter 💬 Could you survive one ice age winter? Tell me in the comments. ▶️ WATCH NEXT: Ice Age Winters Didn't Just Test Our Ancestors. They Made Us Human    • How Ice Age Winters Made Us Human, Explain...   📺 Full playlist:    • How Early Humans Really Lived   📚 SOURCES • Verheijen, I. et al. (2023). Early evidence for bear exploitation during MIS 9 from the site of Schöningen 12. Journal of Human Evolution, 177. • Gilligan, I. (2019). Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory. Cambridge University Press. • Pryor, A. J. E. et al. (2020). The chronology and function of a new circular mammoth-bone structure at Kostenki 11. Antiquity, 94(374). • Iakovleva, L. & Djindjian, F. (2005). New data on mammoth bone settlements of Eastern Europe in the light of the new excavations of the Gontsy site (Ukraine). Quaternary International, 126–128. • Hammel, H. T. (1964). Terrestrial animals in cold: recent studies of primitive man. Handbook of Physiology. • Bartsiokas, A. & Arsuaga, J. L. (2020). Hibernation in hominins from Atapuerca, Spain half a million years ago. L'Anthropologie, 124(5). • Olsen, S. L. (1989). Solutré: a theoretical approach to the reconstruction of Upper Palaeolithic hunting strategies. Journal of Human Evolution, 18(4). #IceAge #Cavemen #EarlyHumans