How Ice Age Humans Survived Brutal Winters With No Heat

It's 2 a.m., the power is out and your apartment is freezing. Now picture a family 18,000 years ago, asleep at the mouth of a cave in an Ice Age winter, with no heating and no walls, and they were mostly fine. How did they do it? We work through it one problem at a time: making and feeding a fire, building beds that kept them warm, sewing fitted clothes with bone needles, living on reindeer fat and boiling water with hot rocks, lighting the dark with stone lamps, and how grandparents, dogs and kids each had a job in keeping the group alive. The answers are smarter, and stranger, than "they huddled around a fire." Main sources: Tierney et al. 2020, Nature: how cold the Last Glacial Maximum was Straus, Geiling & González Morales 2018; El Mirón Cave and the Red Lady (Archaeology, 2015) Wadley et al. 2020, Science: 200,000-year-old grass beds Medina-Alcaide et al. 2021, PLOS ONE: Palaeolithic cave lighting; French Ministry of Culture, Lascaux Tallavaara et al. 2015, PNAS: Ice Age population of Europe Pastoors et al. 2021: children's footprints in caves If this made you look at your thermostat differently, subscribe and turn on notifications. A new deep dive into how ancient people really lived comes out every week. Tell us in the comments: which Ice Age trick would you steal first? #IceAge #History #Prehistory 0:00 - It's 2 a.m. and the heat is gone 1:06 - Not really cavemen: how cold was it? 3:10 - Fire: you are the power plant 5:00 - The long night: the oldest beds 7:12 - The needle that changed winter 9:24 - Reindeer, fat and hot rocks 11:43 - Into the dark: lamps and cave art 14:08 - Grandma, wolves and the Red Lady 16:26 - The kids: footprints and jobs 18:22 - What they really had