How Did Ice Age Humans Survive the Winter?

The first cold snap hits and you just crank up the thermostat. But twenty thousand years ago, half of Europe was buried under ice, with no houses, no windows and no puffer jackets. How did Ice Age humans survive winters like that? And why did some of them have to leave to make it? In this video we find out why the cave wasn't the cozy shelter we picture, and we meet the Young Prince of Arene Candide, a teenager killed by a bear in northwest Italy about 28,000 years ago. We step inside the mammoth-bone huts of Mezhyrich in Ukraine and the mysterious Kostenki ring in Russia, built from the bones of at least sixty mammoths. We go down into the half-buried houses of Siberia, where a boy related to both Europeans and Native Americans was buried, step into the figurine hut of Dolní Věstonice and walk on the engraved stone floor of Gönnersdorf. We see how people burned bones for heat, lit the long nights with fat lamps, and whether our ancestors really hibernated like bears. And at the end, the twist: according to DNA, Italy was not the Ice Age refuge everyone assumed. The people who lived there vanished, and a different population arrived from the Balkans. Chapters 0:00 The first cold snap 0:30 The promise 1:13 The great freeze 1:57 A warm-weather animal 2:46 The cave myth 3:23 The boy and the bear 4:25 Subscribe 4:46 A fire with no trees 5:32 Mammoth houses 6:52 Houses dug into the ground 7:39 The boy from Mal'ta 8:30 The figurine hut 9:27 The stone floor 10:15 The long night 10:59 The ice pantry 11:29 Hibernating like bears? 12:18 Furs 12:48 Leaving 13:40 The twist 14:24 The answer 14:55 Ending Main sources Pryor et al. 2020, Antiquity – the Kostenki 11 mammoth-bone circle Chu et al. 2025, Open Research Europe – dating the Mezhyrich huts Sparacello et al. 2025, Journal of Anthropological Sciences – the Young Prince of Arene Candide and the bear Bartsiokas & Arsuaga 2020, L'Anthropologie – the hibernation hypothesis at Sima de los Huesos Raghavan et al. 2014, Nature – the genome of the Mal'ta boy Vandiver et al. 1989, Science – the fired clay figurines of Dolní Věstonice Posth et al. 2023, Nature – the DNA of European hunter-gatherers through the Ice Age Monegato et al. 2007, Quaternary Research – the Garda glacier at the Last Glacial Maximum Théry-Parisot 2002, Journal of Archaeological Science – bone as fuel de Beaune & White 1993, Scientific American – Ice Age lamps Dates are approximate and follow the estimates of the studies cited. #iceage #prehistory #history