The most recent ice age peaked between 24,000 and 21,000 years ago, when vast ice sheets covered North America and northern Europe, and mountain ranges like Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro and South America's Andes were encased in glaciers.
At that point, our Homo sapiens ancestors had migrated from the warm African heartland into northern European and Eurasian latitudes severely impacted by the sinking temperatures. Armed with big, creative brains and sophisticated tools, though, these early modern humans—nearly identical to ourselves physically—not only survived but thrived in their harsh surroundings.
Language, Art and Storytelling Helped Survival
For our _Homo sapien_s forebears living during the last ice age, there were several critical advantages to having a large brain, explains Brian Fagan, an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of many books, including Cro Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans and Climate Chaos: Lessons on Survival from our Ancestors.
"One of the most important things about Homo sapiens is that we had fluent speech," says Fagan, "plus the ability to conceptualize and plan ahead."
With the advent of language, knowledge about the natural world and new technologies could be shared between neighboring bands of humans and also passed down from generation to generation via storytellers.
"They had institutional memory through symbolic storytelling, which gave them a relationship with the forces of the environment, the supernatural forces which governed their world."
Also through music, dance and art, our ancestors collected and transmitted vast amounts of information about the seasons, edible plants, animal migrations, weather patterns and more. The elaborate cave paintings at sites like Lascaux and Chauvet in France display the intimate understanding that late ice age humans possessed about the natural world, especially the prey animals they depended on for survival.