# What was the Ice Age?

An episode of [History for Kids / History's Not Boring: The Kids History Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1852047160), 26 Sep 2026, 13 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2555342/episodes/19832510-what-was-the-ice-age.mp3

Grab your warmest winter coat, because we are traveling back in time 20,000 years to a world covered in ice! What was the Ice Age? It was a freezing time in Earth's history when huge sheets of solid ice towered two miles high into the sky! But the extreme cold wasn't the only amazing thing—the world was ruled by giant, incredible beasts called Megafauna. Imagine walking alongside a colossal woolly mammoth covered in three feet of shaggy hair, or a giant ground sloth the size of an elephant! Watch out for the terrifying sabre-toothed cat and its eleven-inch fangs! How did early humans survive with these mega-monsters roaming around? They used incredible teamwork and smarts! Discover how our ancestors carved tiny sewing needles from bone to make windproof coats, and built massive houses using the bones of 149 mammoths! You'll also learn about a secret grassy bridge connecting entire continents, an amazing hunting tool that launched spears at 100 miles per hour, and a real baby mammoth perfectly frozen in time! Join Mira and Finn on this freezing adventure into the Pleistocene Epoch!

## Transcript

[0:00] SPEAKER_00: Welcome to History's Not Boring by Kidopoly.com.
[0:04] SPEAKER_00: I'm Mira! And I'm Finn.
[0:06] SPEAKER_00: Before we jump into today's massive adventure, we have some special shout-outs.
[0:12] SPEAKER_00: A big hello to Asher, who is nine, and Ellie, who is six, in Wisconsin.
[0:17] SPEAKER_00: And hello to five-year-old Alfie and his brother Harry in Cheshire, England.
[0:22] SPEAKER_00: You all asked for an episode on the Ice Age, which is a brilliant choice.
[0:27] SPEAKER_00: We also want to wish a very happy seventh birthday to Michael in Texas, who listens every day on the way home from school with his sister Emma! Happy birthday, Michael! I hope you have a totally awesome day.
[0:41] SPEAKER_00: If you haven't already, tap follow wherever you're listening so you never miss an episode.
[0:47] SPEAKER_00: So, Mira, the ice age.
[0:49] SPEAKER_00: Just how cold are we talking?
[0:51] SPEAKER_00: Like, do I need a jacket or a spacesuit?
[0:55] SPEAKER_00: Finn, imagine opening your front door and looking up at a wall of solid ice.
[1:01] SPEAKER_00: And it's not just a little tall, it is two miles high.
[1:05] SPEAKER_00: That's about 10,000 feet straight up into the sky.
[1:09] SPEAKER_00: Two miles high?
[1:11] SPEAKER_00: That's taller than the tallest skyscrapers in the world stacked on top of each other.
[1:16] SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
[1:17] SPEAKER_00: Today we are travelling back in time to one of the most extreme chapters in Earth's history.
[1:23] SPEAKER_00: A world ruled by giant beasts, frozen landscapes, and incredible human survival.
[1:30] SPEAKER_00: Bring on the woolly mammoths.
[1:32] SPEAKER_00: Let's go! To start, let's set our time machine for a period called the Pleistocene Epoch.
[1:39] SPEAKER_00: We're zooming in on a time about 20,000 years ago, known as the Last Glacial Maximum.
[1:46] SPEAKER_00: Glacial Maximum?
[1:47] SPEAKER_00: Does that mean the glaciers were at their absolute biggest?
[1:51] SPEAKER_00: You got it! During this time, massive sheets of ice covered huge chunks of North America, Northern Europe, and parts of Asia.
[2:00] SPEAKER_00: In fact, Asher and Ellie's home state of Wisconsin was mostly buried under one of these giant ice sheets.
[2:07] SPEAKER_00: No way! So the whole world was a giant snowball.
[2:12] SPEAKER_00: Not the entire world.
[2:14] SPEAKER_00: Places near the equator were still warm, but the global average temperature dropped by about 11 degrees Fahrenheit.
[2:21] SPEAKER_00: That might not sound like much, but it completely changed the planet.
[2:26] SPEAKER_00: How so?
[2:27] SPEAKER_00: What else changed besides being super cold?
[2:30] SPEAKER_00: Well, because so much of the Earth's water was frozen in those two mile thick glaciers, global sea levels actually dropped by 400 feet.
[2:40] SPEAKER_00: 400 feet?
[2:42] SPEAKER_00: That means all the oceans just shrunk.
[2:44] SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
[2:45] SPEAKER_00: That is a 40-story building of water disappearing from the coastlines.
[2:50] SPEAKER_00: Because of this, huge areas of land that are underwater today were suddenly dry land.
[2:56] SPEAKER_00: So you could walk places you can't walk today?
[2:59] SPEAKER_00: Like across the ocean?
[3:01] SPEAKER_00: Yes.
[3:02] SPEAKER_00: The most famous example is the Bering Land Bridge.
[3:05] SPEAKER_00: It connected modern-day Russia to Alaska across the Bering Sea.
[3:09] SPEAKER_00: It was a massive grassy plain, up to 600 miles wide.
[3:14] SPEAKER_00: A 600 mile-wide bridge made of grass and dirt.
[3:18] SPEAKER_00: That's big enough for a whole migration of animals.
[3:21] SPEAKER_00: You read my mind, Finn! Because wandering across those frozen plains were some of the most incredible creatures to ever walk the earth.
[3:30] SPEAKER_00: A group we call the Megafauna.
[3:33] SPEAKER_00: Megafauna?
[3:34] SPEAKER_00: Mega means giant, right?
[3:36] SPEAKER_00: Tell me about the big ones.
[3:38] SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the king of the ice age, the woolly mammoth.
[3:42] SPEAKER_00: Imagine an elephant, but 9 to 11 feet tall at the shoulder, weighing six tons, and covered in hair up to three feet long.
[3:52] unknown: Ha!
[3:52] SPEAKER_00: Three feet of hair! They must have looked like walking shag carpets.
[3:57] SPEAKER_00: Did they have those huge tusks?
[4:00] SPEAKER_00: They sure did.
[4:01] SPEAKER_00: Their curved tusks could grow up to 15 feet long.
[4:05] SPEAKER_00: They used them like giant snowplows to sweep snow off the grass so they could eat.
[4:10] SPEAKER_00: Okay, mammoths are cool.
[4:11] SPEAKER_00: But what about the dangerous predators?
[4:14] SPEAKER_00: Were there any mega monsters out there?
[4:16] SPEAKER_00: Oh definitely.
[4:17] SPEAKER_00: How about the sabre-toothed cat, known as Smylodon?
[4:21] SPEAKER_00: They prowled around North and South America, and they had top canine teeth that were 11 inches long.
[4:28] SPEAKER_00: 11 inches?
[4:29] SPEAKER_00: That's almost the length of a ruler.
[4:32] SPEAKER_00: Could they bite a mammoth?
[4:33] SPEAKER_00: They mostly hunted young or weak mammoths, as well as giant bison and ice age camels.
[4:39] SPEAKER_00: Yes, camels originally lived in North America.
[4:43] SPEAKER_00: Wait, camels in the snow?
[4:45] SPEAKER_00: That's crazy! What else was out there?
[4:48] SPEAKER_00: My favourite is the giant ground sloth, or megatherium.
[4:52] SPEAKER_00: Today's sloths are small and hang in trees, but these ancient sloths were 20 feet long from nose to tail and weighed up to four tons.
[5:01] SPEAKER_00: Four tons?
[5:02] SPEAKER_00: That's the size of an elephant! Did they sleep in giant trees?
[5:07] SPEAKER_00: No, they were way too heavy to climb.
[5:10] SPEAKER_00: They stood on the ground and reared up on their massive hind legs to pull down high tree branches.
[5:16] SPEAKER_00: They even had enormous curved claws to defend themselves from predators.
[5:20] SPEAKER_00: Giant cats, elephant-sized sloths, huge mammoths.
[5:25] SPEAKER_00: How did humans survive with all these dangerous beasts around?
[5:29] SPEAKER_00: Early humans, our ancestors, had to be incredibly smart and adaptable.
[5:35] SPEAKER_00: The two most important tools they had were fire and clothing.
[5:40] SPEAKER_00: Clothing?
[5:41] SPEAKER_00: Like, did they knit winter sweaters?
[5:44] SPEAKER_00: Actually, around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, humans invented a brilliant tool, the sewing needle.
[5:52] SPEAKER_00: They carved tiny needles out of animal bone, which let them tightly stitch together animal furs to make warm, windproof coats and boots.
[6:02] SPEAKER_00: Whoa, so bone needles saved humanity from freezing.
[6:06] SPEAKER_00: What about their houses?
[6:07] SPEAKER_00: Did they just live in caves?
[6:09] SPEAKER_00: Many did, but on the open plains where there were no caves, they got very creative.
[6:15] SPEAKER_00: In a place called Meserich in modern-day Ukraine, archaeologists found huts built 15,000 years ago.
[6:23] SPEAKER_00: Do you know what they were made of?
[6:26] SPEAKER_00: Wood?
[6:27] SPEAKER_00: Ice blocks, like in igloo?
[6:29] SPEAKER_00: Mammoth bones! A settlement of four huts contained the bones of 149 individual mammoths.
[6:37] SPEAKER_00: They used massive skulls for the base, jaw bones for the walls, and curved tusks to support the roof.
[6:45] SPEAKER_00: Huts made from the bones of 149 mammoths! That must have weighed a ton! Actually, a single hut weighed over 20 tons.
[6:55] SPEAKER_00: It was an incredible feat of teamwork.
[6:57] SPEAKER_00: And teamwork is also how they hunted.
[7:00] SPEAKER_00: They used a tool called an atlatl, which is a spear thrower.
[7:05] SPEAKER_00: A spear thrower?
[7:06] SPEAKER_00: How fast did it make the spears go?
[7:08] SPEAKER_00: The Atlatle acts like an extension of your arm, giving you a huge leverage boost.
[7:14] SPEAKER_00: It allowed Ice Age hunters to throw spears at over 100 miles per hour.
[7:20] SPEAKER_00: A hundred miles per hour?
[7:22] SPEAKER_00: That's as fast as a baseball pitcher in the major leagues.
[7:25] SPEAKER_00: No wonder they could hunt big animals.
[7:27] SPEAKER_00: Around 11,700 years ago, the Earth finally started to warm up again.
[7:34] SPEAKER_00: The massive glaciers began to melt and sea levels rapidly rose back up.
[7:39] SPEAKER_00: Did that flood the 600-mile Bering Land Bridge?
[7:43] SPEAKER_00: It did.
[7:44] SPEAKER_00: The bridge disappeared underwater, separating Asia and North America once again.
[7:49] SPEAKER_00: The changing climate and human hunting also caused most of the megafauna, like the woolly mammoths and sabertoothed cats, to eventually go extinct.
[8:00] SPEAKER_00: That's kind of sad, losing all those amazing giant animals.
[8:04] SPEAKER_00: It is sad, but it's part of the great cycle of Earth's history.
[8:09] SPEAKER_00: But guess what?
[8:10] SPEAKER_00: We still have some totally weird leftovers from the Ice Age today.
[8:15] SPEAKER_00: Weird leftovers?
[8:16] SPEAKER_00: Lay it on me, Mira! Okay, those two mile-high glaciers were so heavy that they literally dented the Earth's crust.
[8:26] SPEAKER_00: Millions of square miles of rock got squished down.
[8:29] SPEAKER_00: The ice squished the actual planet.
[8:32] SPEAKER_00: Yes.
[8:33] SPEAKER_00: And even though the ice melted thousands of years ago, parts of Canada and Scandinavia are still slowly bouncing back up today, like a slow-motion foam mattress.
[8:44] SPEAKER_00: It's called glacial rebound.
[8:47] SPEAKER_00: That is wild.
[8:48] SPEAKER_00: The earth is still bouncing back.
[8:51] SPEAKER_00: Do we ever find frozen ice age animals?
[8:54] SPEAKER_00: Yes, in places like Siberia, the ground is permanently frozen, called permafrost.
[9:00] SPEAKER_00: In 2007, they found a baby woolly mammoth named Luba preserved so perfectly, she even had her eyelashes and trunk completely intact after 40,000 years.
[9:13] SPEAKER_00: Alright Finn, time for the quiz.
[9:15] SPEAKER_00: Are you ready to see what you remember about the frozen world?
[9:18] SPEAKER_00: I'm ready.
[9:19] SPEAKER_00: Hit me with your best ice age questions.
[9:23] SPEAKER_00: First question.
[9:24] SPEAKER_00: How thick in miles were the biggest ice sheets during the last glacial maximum?
[9:33] SPEAKER_00: Next one.
[9:34] SPEAKER_00: What was the name of the 600-mile-wide land bridge that allowed people to walk from Russia to Alaska?
[9:45] SPEAKER_00: Question 3.
[9:47] SPEAKER_00: How many inches long were the canine teeth of a sabre-toothed cat?
[9:55] SPEAKER_00: Here's number four.
[9:56] SPEAKER_00: What animal parts did early humans in Ukraine use to build their massive huts 15,000 years ago?
[10:08] SPEAKER_00: Last question.
[10:23] SPEAKER_00: The first answer is the ice sheets were two miles thick.
[10:28] SPEAKER_00: For question two, it was the Bering Land Bridge.
[10:32] SPEAKER_00: Number three, the answer is their teeth were 11 inches long.
[10:38] SPEAKER_00: Question 4.
[10:39] SPEAKER_00: They used the bones of 149 mammoths to build their huts.
[10:45] SPEAKER_00: And the final answer is the tool was called an atlatl or spear thrower.
[10:50] SPEAKER_00: What an episode! I think I want a giant ground sloth for a pet mirror.
[10:55] SPEAKER_00: I'd ride it everywhere.
[10:57] SPEAKER_00: A four-ton sloth! You'd have to plant an entire forest just to feed it every week.
[11:03] SPEAKER_00: That's a risk I'm willing to take.
[11:06] SPEAKER_00: Listeners, if you loved learning about woolly mammoths and ice giants today, we'd love it if you could leave us a five-star review.
[11:14] SPEAKER_00: Just scroll down in your app and tap the stars.
[11:16] SPEAKER_00: It really helps the show.
[11:19] SPEAKER_00: And make sure to hit that follow button right here so you get every new adventure.
[11:24] SPEAKER_00: Oh, and we have sister shows too.
[11:26] SPEAKER_00: Science and philosophy is not boring, and maths is not boring.
[11:30] SPEAKER_00: Go give those a listen and a follow as well.
[11:33] SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
[11:34] SPEAKER_00: And if you want a shout out on the show, or just want to tell us your favourite Ice Age animal, ask an adult to email us at hello at kidopoly.com.
[11:44] SPEAKER_00: I'm Team Sabretooth all the way.
[11:47] SPEAKER_00: See you next time on History's Not Boring.
[11:50] SPEAKER_00: Bye everyone.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.