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We’ve become so accustomed to how the Earth is in the present day, we can hardly imagine it being any different.
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Let alone massively different like it was back in the Ice Age. It wasn’t just colder, it wasn’t just icier, almost every facet of life on Earth was drastically different.
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Looking back at Earth during the Ice Age, it almost looked like a different planet.
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So, what was the earth like during the Ice Age?
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We’d like to shed some light on this, paint the details for you, and clear up a lot of misconceptions,
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as well as let you in on a little secret about why it isn’t just… The Ice Age.
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You will often hear “The Ice Age” but the truth is, there wasn’t just one. There were several Ice Ages.
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Scientists have determined that there have been at least five in Earth’s history. The oldest one that we know of is Huronian, 2.4 to 2.1 billion years ago.
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Then, the Cryogenian, 720 to 630 million years ago. Then, there was the Andean-Saharan, that 460 to 420 million years ago.
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Next, there was the Late Paleozoic, that was between 360 to 260 million years ago.
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And then, the most recent Ice Age is what’s known as the Quaternary Ice Age, which was between 2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago.
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So, when you think about it, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t all that long ago.
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All the Ice Ages vary, of course, but they shared many similarities.
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And when people talk about the Ice Age, they are often speaking of the most recent Ice Age, the Quaternary.
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For all you dinosaur experts that remember dinosaurs existed mainly between 245 to 66 million years ago,
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you will notice that the era of dinosaurs fits snugly between the last two Ice Ages. And really, they went extinct over 60 million years before this latest Ice Age came about.
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So, the Ice Age didn’t kill the dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs weren’t the predominant species roaming the snow-covered planet a few million years ago.
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So, which animals were we seeing during those times?
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Ice Age Animals
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As we mentioned, dinosaurs were gone by the time this most recent Ice Age rolled around. Those giant reptiles didn’t rule the Earth anymore. So who did?
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There were a lot of species of animals that adapted for the Ice Age and even some that thrived in it.
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There were cave bears which usually were between 800 to 2,000 pounds, the largest being the size of modern day polar bears.
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There were dire wolves that roamed all over the grasslands, interestingly, less closely related to the grey wolf and more closely related to the African jackal.
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There were deer and tapirs, both being the favorite targets of the sabre-toothed cats, owner of one of the most famous sets of teeth in the era.
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There were a lot of larger animals, distant relatives to those we have today, but bigger.
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There were giant beavers, and if you thought modern day beavers already had big teeth, some giant beavers had teeth the size of hot dogs!
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Instead of our regular modern day sloths, the Ice Age had giant ground sloths.
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Not the cute 10-pound sloths you see hanging out on a tree branch,
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giant ground sloths were about 12 feet tall when they stood on their hind legs and could weigh four tons!
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And let’s not forget about the most well-known Ice Age animals, the woolly mammoths and mastodons.
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They stood between 10 to 12 feet tall and weighed 6 to 8 tons. And don’t forget about those famous tusks, which were 15 feet long!
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Though smaller than woolly mammoths, this animal was a huge version of its modern day cousins.
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The Diprotodon was a massive marsupial… the largest marsupial ever to walk the Earth!
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The current largest marsupials are red kangaroos and they are just shy of nine feet from tail to tip of the head and weigh nearly 200 pounds.
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The Diprotodon was over 13 feet from tail to head and weighed a whopping 7,000 pounds!
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And we mentioned dinosaurs didn’t rule the Earth anymore, but that didn’t mean there were giant reptiles still existing.
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Though an Ice Age proves difficult for a cold-blooded animal to live and thrive, there were still some.
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Especially in Australia where the temperatures hadn’t plummeted as much.
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There were giant crocodiles and snakes and the big uncle to the Komodo Dragon, a monitor lizard called Megalania.
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This apex predator could be as long as 23 feet long!
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But don’t forget our distant relatives, neanderthals existed during the Ice Age as well.
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Though neanderthals weren’t quite thriving as these other animals were, but they survived.
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But what was it like to walk the Earth for neanderthals and for all these animals? And how did they continually get by?
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The Details
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Not every animal could just get by in an Ice Age. We alluded to the giant reptiles that were able to thrive in places like Australia because it wasn’t quite as cold there.
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Being cold-blooded, that was a necessity.
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But other animals, like the woolly mammoth were huge and had excess hair, perfectly equipped for the cold.
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In fact, they fed off the vegetation that became the predominant plant life during the Ice Age.
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The woolly mammoths specifically would use their 15-foot long tusks to dig underneath the snow, root around, and find shrubs to feast on.
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This was another reason why where were so many larger animals. The larger you are, the warmer you can stay in cold temperatures. At least in terms of mammals anyway.
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Today ice covers roughly 11% of all land but back during this last Ice Age it covered about 25% of the land.
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Not only was it consistently cold but it was also dry. Water levels in the oceans were far lower than they are now.
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Estimates put them at over 400 feet lower than their current positions, meaning many portions of the continental shelf were exposed.
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And due to this, there were many more land bridges and giant ice sheets spanning the globe, connecting places that are now separated by huge areas of water.
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For instance, you may have been familiar with the Bering land bridge which connected Asia and North America and allowed people to cross from one continent to the other.
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That land bridge is now a strait. But if you look at the island country of Indonesia, that used to be much more land in that region.
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In fact, it’s referred to as a “lost continent” Sundaland, that used to be all areas in which people and animals could walk across.
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Ireland was connected to Great Britain by a giant sheet of ice and Great Britain featured a land bridge to the rest of Europe.
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Even Japan used to be connected to the rest of Asia. The Yellow Sea was completely dry and what is now the Sea of Japan used to just be a lake.
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So much of Earth’s terrain was vastly different.
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Not only were these areas of ocean and seas low and dried up, leaving land for animals to walk across… much of the land was ice! Completely frozen over.
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There was the convenience of having more land, but it wasn’t all that convenient when it was made up of dangerous ice.
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Ice that was sometimes so thick it was impenetrable. For animals searching for food, this could be a problem.
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And the frigid temperatures were obviously also a danger. Animals had to live specific lifestyles just to endure the constant cold. If not, chances are they could go extinct.
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As you may be well aware, you get different plant life in different seasons, climates, and temperatures.
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There was still vegetation during this time, though it was vastly different than what was around before and after the Ice Age.
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Many of the animals that thrived in this time were the ones that ate steady diets of these plants.
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And that was part of the reason many of these species from the Ice Age went extinct as the Ice Age came to a close.
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You might think, if these animals could survive the Ice Age, they could survive anything. Why did so many go extinct when the planet started to warm up.
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Sure, they were used to colder climates so the warming up would be a big change for them. But one big difference was the plant life changing dramatically.
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Large mammals that fed on vegetation saw a warming climate, they saw their habitat changing into something unsuitable,
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they could not maintain their habitats as shrubs spread, and this was all bad news for them.
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Add to the fact that humans began hunting even more during these times and you have a compounded reason as to why these herbivores went extinct.
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Now, think of the carnivores that hunted these herbivores that were dwindling, so they too went extinct.
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Some lasted longer than others. Mammoths used to range huge swaths of the world, even from what is present day Canada down to Honduras.
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And though most of them went extinct over 10,000 years ago, as the Ice Age was finally departing our planet,
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archeologists actually uncovered fossils of mammoths in Arctic islands, proving they still existed as recently as 4,500 years ago!
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They were just relocating to colder, more preferable places. That means that mammoths still existed during the time Egyptians were building the pyramids.
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The Ice Age was far different from the world today. And it was a long time ago… but really, not so long ago in the grand scheme of things.
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If those mammoths that ruled the lands during the Ice Age were still around as humans were building structures,
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then that shows us just how close the Ice Age was to yesterday.
