The Ice Age
The Ancients
History Hit
4.7 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 28 December 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
Think of the Ice Age and tales of ferocious sabre-toothed tigers and giant megafauna likely spring to mind - but what do we know about prehistoric human culture 25,000 years ago and how people survived a perilous landscape of marauding Woolly Mammoths, bitterly cold temperatures and primitive Stone Age tools?
Tristan Hughes is joined by Cody Cassidy to look at how early cultures adapted to the extremes of the Last Glacial Period. Looking at the rapidly changing landscape, the cause of the big freeze and prehistoric hunting methods - do you have what it takes to survive the Ice Age?
This episode was first released in October 2023.
MORE
Ice Age Britain: Finding the First Homo sapiens
Ice Age America
Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Tudorburg forest? |
| 0:04.0 | What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? |
| 0:07.0 | Or what made Alexander truly great? |
| 0:10.0 | With a subscription to history hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. |
| 0:17.0 | You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week |
| 0:22.5 | covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. |
| 0:26.5 | Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. |
| 0:30.3 | Hello, I hope you're doing well and are enjoying the festive period. |
| 0:34.8 | Wishing you once again, wish you a very Merry Christmas as we get nearer also now to |
| 0:39.3 | New Year and 2026, where we have got some very exciting episodes lined up for you. Cannot wait to |
| 0:45.4 | share them, but you can have to wait a little longer because the ancients team are still enjoying |
| 0:49.8 | their holidays. I've tried to rein them back in, but they're on strike. They're saying no no. They're saying, Tristan, we'd observe our holiday. Stop being so cruel. Stop making us listen to your |
| 0:59.1 | voice all the time again and again and again. And I've had to give in. So, we are doing another |
| 1:05.6 | episode from the archive today. This is one which we released over two years ago now. It was incredibly popular at the time, |
| 1:13.6 | and I can understand why. This was from our How to Survive series. Once in a while, we do do an |
| 1:19.5 | episode in the format of How to Survive in Ancient Rome or Babylonia. This one, we went a bit bigger. |
| 1:26.4 | We did How to Survive the Ice Age, which is a pretty |
| 1:29.1 | massive topic to try and cover. But within that, we then focused in on what do we know about |
| 1:35.8 | early humans surviving in a very difficult geographical region of the Ice Age more than 20,000 |
| 1:43.1 | years ago. In particular, we looked at this culture |
| 1:45.8 | known as the, wait for it, the Pavlovian culture in central Europe, more than 20,000 years ago. |
| 1:51.9 | They hunted mammoths and had a fascinating culture. And to talk through it all, we have the |
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