Ice Age-A Frozen World
Premiere Date: July 16, 2023
Genres: Nature, History
Casts: Steve Backshall, Michaela Strachan, Chris Jackson
The UK’s Channel 5 aired a brief but highly informative documentary about the ice age this past summer. Next to the Jurassic period, it’s probably the most popular ancient era amongst the public. If asked, paleontologists will assure you that woolly mammoths didn’t really sound like Ray Romano.
While only three one-hour episodes long, the lavishly produced series included a fascinating range of information that had been recently uncovered and will be new to most viewers.
For example, we learn a bit about the actual methods humans and Neanderthals used to bring down gigantic prey, such was mammoths and mastodons. It was an age of giant animals: 800 pound beavers, sloths the size of elephants. And some critters that you might find awkward neighbors: sabre-tooth cats, scimitar cats (neither of those were actually cats, but that was scant consolation to their prey), bears that reared up to a height of 13 feet, and, just to keep property values up, dire wolves because who wouldn’t want to be chased by a pack of ferocious, smart animals that measured eight feet from nose to tail?
The series addresses the various strategies hominids employed to eat their neighbors whilst avoiding getting eaten. Unlike the various dinosaur recreation series that assume dinosaurs had eating, mating and defense strategies similar to physically correlating animals of today, the evidence supporting such depictions here is based on actual, physical evidence.
Why did most of the giant animals of that era die out or shrink? One answer is global warming. The ice fields and glaciers melted, temperatures rose, small prey migrated or died out, and large prey was decimated by something as simple as heat exhaustion. Global temperatures rose by 5-8C over a period of five thousand years, or about fifty times more gradual than the climate change we’re inflicting upon ourselves now. Even without the vast environmental changes that were so hard on animals with specialty diets or who roamed and migrated, depending on seasons for food, some, such as the mammoths, may have simply died out from heat exhaustion.
Why did the big pseudo cats die out? The series speculates that they were “ambush” predators, jumping down on prey and stabbing them with those out-sized canines. That is fine with critter the size of deer or even bears, but imagine trying it against something the size of a housecat, let alone a rat.
Evidence suggests that Neanderthals were stronger, faster, and possibly smarter than homo sapiens. They had 30% more lung capacity, and their brains were about 10% larger. This puts a large dent in the self-satisfied notion that we prevailed because we were evolutionarily superior.
So what happened to the Neanderthals? Here’s a hint: their physical characteristics suggested they needed four thousand calories a day to sustain themselves, nearly double that of us.
It’s a good series, with information and photography rising to the levels of Attenborough. Well worth bingeing.
Available for free on Watchserie ( https://www.watchserie.stream/tv-series/ice-age-a-frozen-world/ )