Farewell to the Weichselian

Many people today talk of what they call “the ice age” as a single finite event in the human story.


It was a distant, primitive time, when our brutish, ugly cousins the neanderthals still roamed the Earth in the cold, frozen tundras of what are today the green regions of Northern and Central Europe. Often we imagine a time when these hideous people, somewhere between human and animal shared the world with iconic animals of the period like the woolly mammoth, and the woolly rhinoceros, all of them on the lookout for that animal which has come to be the very symbol of the era - the saber-tooth cat.


Today the great glaciers that once covered all of what is today Canada, Norway, Denmark, and much of Britain and Ireland have receded beyond the Arctic Circle. The world seems to have been tamed, and the prehistoric giants are all, every last one of them, lost to history.


But what was the “ice age”? Was it a single, finite event? Or was it just part of a long cycle, going back millions of years?


Contrary to popular imagery, the latter is true. The “ice age” that we commonly refer to was but one of many that occurred over the course of the past 2,588,000 years, and may not be the last one that we as a species will witness. No, before the advent of the last “ice age”, some 115-110,000 years ago, the world was actually considerably warmer than it is today, with tropical animals like hippos living as far north as Southern Britain.


Then, for reasons that we can only speculate, the world began a process of rapid cooling. Where the ice sheets had melted everywhere save Antarctica and Greenland, they suddenly began to expand again until nearly all of Britain and Scandinavia lay under an ice sheet, and all of Canada and much of the Continental United States did also.


Life in these places, especially in Europe, where many species found themselves pressed between the glaciers of the north and the heavily glaciated Alps, Pyrenees, and Balkan mountain ranges, was pushed to the brink, especially during the last glacial maximum.


The last glacial maximum moved the tree line some 20 degrees farther south than it is today, locking up much of the world’s freshwater in giant glaciers and thus drying out the entire planet. Indeed, the world was so dry during this time that the dust levels of the atmosphere were as much as 25 times greater than they are today.


But what if the world had not been so cruel? What if the climate of this harsh period of our planet’s history had been slightly more mild? What would our world look like if life had not been put under the same tremendous pressure?


Would we know those animals that live today only in our imaginations? And if we did, how might their continued presence have shaped us, and our interaction with the world that we live in? Would we be the same species we are today?
 
Hahaha... I have some map making to do it seems before I can post my next update. Or is there a place where I can request maps be made on here?
 
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