This video was sponsored by The Great Courses plus, an online video service which provides you with access to a lot of
interesting lectures. So stay tuned till after to find out more. As winter has officially arrived,
we see snow gently fall to the ground, filling us with holiday cheer
before slowly crushing us in a freezing tundra. This long period of cold reminds us all, or at least me, of
another time of never ending cold: The Ice age. Every 100,000 years or so, the global temperature drops significantly
and ice spreads out across the Northern hemisphere,
covering vast areas of North America, Europe and Siberia under glaciers. The rest of the world
experiences a significantly cooler and drier climate. These periods of planet-wide
coldness are commonly referred to as
ice ages. They last for thousands of years and then the glacier slowly recede, the Earth warms back up and the cycle begins anew.
The last ice age ended around 12,000 years ago, so all of human history has existed in this nice...
Interglacial period, thanks global warming! So as we enter a tiny endless winter of our own. Let's imagine
What if in an alternate timeline?
The last ice age didn't go away. What if it never ended? The last ice age started
35,000 years ago and ended
12,000 years ago. For this scenario, let's say that the glaciers never really retreated once the ice age reached its max extent
20,000 years ago. People can't survive on ice of course and so as the glaciers slowly went south the people migrated south too
Luckily for these ancient humans, there's a lot more land to colonize.
There's only enough water to go around. So the glaciers drained a lot of the ocean, lowering sea levels almost 120 feet,
dramatically altering the map and creating new lands that in our timeline, have been lost for thousands of years
Scientists theorized that people settled and lived their entire lives on these now lost regions which were once all over the world
for a hundred thousand years. In this alternate timeline, had these places not been flooded by the ocean and the population not dispersed,
these regions are now centers of culture,
villages and hunting grounds. Europe is divided into parts: Glacier
Tundra and Plains. The Glaciers have lowered sea levels to change the shape of Europe.
There's no British Isles or Scandinavia.
Northern Europe is one
peninsula named Doggerland. The Rhine and Tom's were connected into one super River which would drain into the atlantic. The sea level dropped so much
that the Italian and Balkan peninsula
connected, creating a vast plain that resembled the fields of Russia. Today this land is covered by the Adriatic sea
But had the ice not melted, this region is one of the few bastions of suitable land on the frigid European continent.
Crossing the vast desert which engulfed most of Asia, we get to Present-day Southeast Asia
Today this area in Indonesia contains thousands of islands stretching down to the continent of Australia.
Yet twenty thousand years ago, this region was simply two lands: Sunda and Sahul.
Sunda's lowest point; an area now covered in ocean, was a tropical
grassland comparable to India. This grassland almost connected
Going through this unified landmass until it reached the grasslands of Northern Sahul, a continent which connected Papua New Guinea and Australia.
If the ice age continued at its maximum.
Glaciers extend throughout all of Present-day Canada. In our timeline, the ancestors of native Americans, simply called the Clovis people,
entered through pass in the melting glaciers about
16,000 years ago. Before then, they had been blocked from entering the new world by a massive wall of ice.
If this massive wall of ice doesn't melt,
the native Americans just don't exist. The Americas remain the last regions on Earth without any
human settlement. Without humans in the Americas, these magnificent beasts and other Megafauna would never have disappeared. People
wiped out the megafauna
not climate. When native Americans came to the New world
13,000 years ago and an odd bit of irony, their hunting culture with their stone tools wiped out the natural
Megafauna which had existed for millions of years in the Americas. Camels and horses,
animals that dominated the Old world came from North America
originally. The only reason why the Llama was the largest animal in the Americas at the time Columbus was because everything else died
thousands of Years ago. Not just camels and horses
but Mastodons, Short-faced bears, Giant sloths, Woolly Rhinos all hunted to extinction.
In this alternate timeline, humans never migrate into the Americas. So today, the natural ecosystems are populated by these animals
Imagine camels on the plains of Kansas, Ground sloths in Connecticut, Elephants in California
Just like this literal ice wall
prevented humans from expanding, the ice age was a wall on the human development. To have civilization,
you need permanent settlement. To have this you need agriculture, and it's no coincidence
Once the glaciers receded 12,000 years ago that agriculture finally began
This was because the climate and weather was most likely so unstable
that it was probably easier to just hunt than to have crops that would randomly die due to the ice age.
The Ice age was the last ultimate prevention of
Humanity's eventual domination over the world. Had the ice age continued,
civilization would not have. The entire rise of a human story is in this brief moment between the glaciers.
Even though winter may have begun, you may have to scrape ice off your car
It could be a whole lot different. Just because of a little difference in the Earth's rotation,
we have invented cars, we've invented indoor heating and the human population now numbers seven billion all over the globe
So what's the entire point of this video? Winter, snow and ice are terrible. They are so terrible
Civilization wouldn't exist if there is more of it.
We have spent thousands of years trying to keep ourselves from experiencing winter. I am not a winter person. Happy first day of winter,
Merry Christmas. Happy life day. This is Cody, of AlternateHistoryHub.
Oh wait, so this video was sponsored by the Great Courses Plus, a subscription on-demand video learning service
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Partially a lecture about the ice age by professor Stuart Sutherland in his course "A New History of Life"
He discussed the time scale and history of mammals as well. Apart from this there's science,
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thegreatcoursesplus.com/althistoryhub. The link is provided in the description below, so go ahead. This is Cody of Alternate History Hub