Chapter 1: North America: The Ice Age

On Saturday 13.^. 12. 2003 the television station VOX showed at 19:10 o’clock the documentary film “Wild America – a witness of the Ice Age 14.000 years ago”. I would like to quote a few parts from it:

Beringia: Northeast Siberia, Alaska, Yukon

Only 14,000 years ago the first human beings came to North America.

Woolly mammoth: With 6 tons the woolly mammoth was about as large as an African elephant bull. Its tusks were up to 4 m long and weighed up to 80 kg, as much as a man.

The steppe bison had longer horns than the bison of today. It was as large as the African cape-buffalo.

The lion of Alaska was ¼ larger than today's lion. Those were the largest, lions, which ever existed.

The Bering Land Bridge was 4 times as large as Germany. The lions and woolly mammoths went from East Siberia to Alaska and occupied from there the North American continent.

The woolly mammoths lived on grass. They lived there together with other grass eaters on the large grasslands of Beringia. Beringia was a cold, dry grassland, the mammoth-steppe.

14,000 years ago large ice-fields covered here the country. They influenced the climate. The ice cover of North America was in some places up to 3 km thick. A large part of Beringia was not covered by ice.

Cold, dry air blew from the glaciers down there, across the country surrounding it. The cold, dry wind, which blew from the glaciers, created an inhospitable climate. Because of the ice, only grasses and small, low plants were able to flourish there.

Only very little snow fell there. In winter only a very thin layer of snow covered the country. Therefore it was easy for the animals, to dig out their fodder.

During the largest part of the year, day and night, the temperature lay under the freezing point. 

Two kinds of bears were living there: the short-faced bear and the brown bear.

The short-faced bear was the largest flesh-eating animal of the ice age. It weighed up to 1 ton.

The steppes spread out up to the mountains.

The Mastodon was 3 meters tall at the shoulder. It was somewhat smaller than the mammoth. It lived on the twigs of pine-trees and other resinous woods, and on aquatic plants, depending on the season.

Hot Springs, South Dakota

Columbian mammoth: It was 4 m tall at the shoulder and weighed over 10 tons. It lived on grass.

13,000 years ago the prairies of North America were wooded. There large forests were growing then, grasses, spruce-trees, and aspen-trees. Somewhat like this, the landscape must have looked there: It was an aspen park-land, with juicy meadows and forests, as far as one was able to see.

A relic of this time is the milk-orange tree. It produces many fruits in autumn. They are as large as a grapefruit. These trees become very large. Today these fruits, when they have fallen down, will rot on the ground. During the ice age many different kinds of animals, also the mammoths, were eating the milk-orange.

The mild climate and the rich vegetation of the Great Plains [the prairie] at the end of the ice age offered an ideal habitat for the different kinds of animals. One may compare this animal world with that of the African Serengeti. Also half-asses and a zebra-like animal grazed there. At least 5 different kinds of horses were grazing on this savannah, also a donkey. There was even an ice-age camel in North America. It was larger than its current relatives.

Adult male bison were 2 m tall at the shoulder and weighed over 1 ton. During the winter they stayed in the forests, which protected them from the wind and the snow-storms, the blizzards. In the spring, when the fresh grass began to grow, the herds moved out again onto the Great Plains.

Mammoth herds, in North America 13,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age: on their pasture, on the tree-savannah, they find much grass.

Florida: Mastodon: 13,000 years ago Florida was a very dry country. The excrement of the mastodons, which was preserved, shows us, what this animal has eaten: Grass and leaves from branches. Florida was covered then with savannahs and forests, instead of the swamps. The mastodon travelled there each year more than 600 km northward. During the winter it stayed in the north. The country was there then so dry, because the sea level was about 70 m lower than today. And the ground-water level lay then much deeper below the surface than today.

Mexico: Pleistocene megafauna

What kinds of animals have lived in Mexico, south of the United States, during the Last Ice Age? On what kind of a plant cover have they lived there? What have palaeontologists found out now about this?

18th International Senckenberg Conference. VI International Paleontological Colloquium in Weimar. Weimar (Germany), 25th – 30th, 2004. Edited by L. C. Maul & R.-D. Kahlke. Berlin 2004.

“Quaternary mammals from Mexico”, by Joaquín Arroyo-Cabbales Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Moneda, Mexico, and co-workers,

“The Pleistocene megafauna was formed by species of great size, many of which are now extinct. That fauna included a group of herbivore animals, typical of grasslands and savannas that occupied most of the current Mexican Plateau. Among these were bison (Bison spp.), camel (Camelops hesternus) (Western camel), two types of horses (Equus spp.), at least three types of berrendos antelopes (Antilocapra americana) (Pronghorn), … ground sloth (Nothrotheriops shastensis) and llama (Hemiauchenia sp.) More importantly, the most characteristic animal on the Pleistocene plains was the mammoth (Mammoth columbi). Concomitant with those large herbivores were large predators, like the Pleistocene lion (Panahera atrox) and dire wolf (Canis dirus) (at least one and a half times the size of the present animals), coyote (Canis latrans), sabre-toothed cat (Smilodon gracilis), and one of the most voracious predators of the period, the short-faced bear (Arctodus spp.). Besides their carnivorous habits, these bears were also scavengers, as were the big vultures and the auras of the period.

In the mountains, including the Neovolcanic Axis, a group of animals adapted to the browsing of bushes and trees. Different types of deer (several of them now extinct) were present, as were mastodon (Mammut americanum), Gomphotheres (Curvieronius tropicus) and Stegomastodon sp., ground sloth (Eremotherium laurilardi) and giant armadillo (Glypthotherium spp.) Among the predators were representatives of the current species, but of larger size, such as puma (Puma concolor), jaguar (Panthera onca) and black (Ursus americanus) and grizzly bears (Ursus arctos).

In large bodies of permanent water, such as Lake Texcoco (in the Basin of Mexico) or Lake Chapala in Jalisco, species like capybaras (Neochoerus sp.), otters (Lontra sp.) and tapirs (Tapirus haysii) coexisted. These forms indicate bodies of fresh water and a lengthy Quaternary history of the lakes.

Man species expanded their distribution to latitudes of higher or lower altitudes and had a more northern or southern distribution during the Pleistocene.” Joaquín Arroyo-Cabrales 18^th International Senckenberg Conference 2004 in Weimar pages 69, 70

Proposed path, along with the mammoth has wandered from northern Africa across Europe and northern Siberia to North America. From: Mammoths by Dick Mol, Larry D. Agenbroad, and Jim I. Mead (1993:4) First the Southern Mammoth wandered to North America. From the Southern Mammoth arose then the Imperial mammoth and the Columbian mammoth. Then the woolly mammoth came from Northeast Siberia to the northern part of North America. The Eurasian woolly mammoth comes from the Steppe Mammoth, and the Steppe Mammoth from the Southern Mammoth in Eurasia. The Eurasian Southern Mammoth is also known as the Southern Elephant.

The ancestors of today’s American Indians, with their spears, with spear-heads made from flint. They come from Northeast Siberia and are now in Alaska. That was 11,500 to 14.000 years ago. Painting from John D. Dawson. Like this, some experts imagine that it could have been. From: Lisa W. Nelson Mammoth Graveyard The Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, South Dakota (1994:20)