

This policy applies to videos, video descriptions, custom thumbnails, live streams and any other YouTube product or feature. In these cases, we may place an age restriction on the video. Meanwhile, the mastodons, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths and other megafauna that reigned during the glacial period went extinct by its end.Sometimes content doesn't violate our policies but it may not be appropriate for viewers under 18. By the start of the warmer Holocene epoch, humans were in position to take advantage of the favorable conditions by developing agricultural and domestication techniques. Humans adapted to the harsh climate by developing such tools as the bone needle to sew warm clothing, and used the land bridges to spread to new regions. One significant outcome of the recent ice age was the development of Homo sapiens. How Humans Adapted to Ice Age's Harsh Climate

The shifting of the Earth’s plates creates large-scale changes to continental masses, which impacts ocean and atmospheric currents, and triggers volcanic activity that releases carbon dioxide into the air. Milankovitch’s findings were corroborated when technological improvements in the 1960s allowed for the analyzation of deep sea ice cores and plankton shells, which helped pinpoint periods of glaciation.Īlong with solar radiation levels, it is believed that global warming and cooling is connected to plate tectonic activity.

Seeking to chart the Earth’s temperature from the past 600,000 years, Milankovitch carefully calculated how orbital variations such as eccentricity, precession and axial tilt affected solar radiation levels, publishing his work in the 1941 book Canon of Insolation and the Ice Age Problem. Geologists soon found evidence of plant life between glacial sediment, and by the close of the century the theory of multiple global winters had been established.Ī second important figure in the development of these studies was Serbian mathematician Milutin Milankovitch. Contradicting the belief that a wide-ranging flood killed off such megafauna as the wooly mammoth, Agassiz pointed to rock striations and sediment piles as evidence of glacier activity from a destructive global winter. The origins of ice age theory began hundreds of years ago, when Europeans noted that glaciers in the Alps had shrunk, but its popularization is credited to 19th century Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz.

In North America, the region of the Gulf Coast states was dotted with the pine forests and prairie grasses that are today associated with the northern states and Canada. Corresponding sea levels plunged more than 400 feet, while global temperatures dipped around 10 degrees Fahrenheit on average and up to 40 degrees in some areas. At the height of the recent glaciation, the ice grew to more than 12,000 feet thick as sheets spread across Canada, Scandinavia, Russia and South America.
