Life & Death At The Height Of The Ice Age 

Wonderfull video, so emotional and, at the same time, devoid of exageration. Fun note, Arene Candide translate as White Sands. P.S. as a matter of consistency, I request a spoon's image in all your video.

The thing I find so disappointing, and I must confess a little irritating, about the usual reconstructions of pre-literate human societies is the incessant projections of post Victorian, European style familial life upon them, subtly, or actually more than subtly, justifying its existence through an imaginary pedigree stretching deep into the past. Much like a monarch tracing his lineage back to the Biblical Adam, many archeologists and anthropologists simply ignore the fact that, outside of a narrow timeframe and confined to specific areas of the world, "the family" as is usually now conceived by most people in North and South America and Europe simply didn't exist. Even now, in modern times, the "Mommy -Daddy-children -pets" template for familial structures is far from universal or uniform. So for us to imagine people so very very different from us in almost every way, living on to all intents and purposes a completely different planet, to live as we do, and to be "like us" in any but extremely basic human ways (they made stuff, they thought things, they felt things, they killed things, they ate, they imagined things) is absurd. Yes, they were human, but exactly what that entails is open to infinite variety, and we'll never ever know what that meant to them.

I say that disk with the deer, was a decision tool for a game/s. As against a visual piece/theatrical device. But that was my first thought too. Peace ✌️ out!

You ever come to Texas I will take you to a clovis, and I suspect pre-clovis site. I don't want to break the law so have watched the erosion expose flint flaking everywhere and a few complete tools (site was well picked prior to 1970s) but has eroded and exposed what looks like a frequent stop only 2 hour drive from gault

One of my favorite videos yet. Fantastic storytelling with lots of information

I like to imagine his family gave him gifts often until they all passed away too. Similar to how modern humans leave gifts on the graves of their close family members often. So no one royal, just someone's baby boy who died too young.

True. They really were just as human as us

@@lordsiomai erm yes! Of course!

Those are just two different ways of saying the same thing.

Perhaps the typical standard of living was much higher than we thought.

The hard part was thinking up new concrete projects when he needed a break.

I've stepped out onto fresh concrete with my shoes on as a kid. 15 years later I was there again and my footprint was there, I realised that only when I saw it.

Our family dips our hands in paint and presses them onto the family sheds in my grandparents’ backyard. We have at least five generations of handprints there. 30,000 years later, and we’re still telling the world we were here and we existed.

That’s some pretty shrewd child psychology.

I think he also may have known how big a deal it is for a kid to be able to make anything like a permanent mark somewhere. Humans natural have this understanding that their control over anything around them is tenuous at best…and this is even more true as a child. And yet for just a moment, everyone was on the same level.

Thanks fishhead, that's very kind of you to say. I genuinely love what I do. If I had the budget I would produce million dollar spectacles with the highest quality animation. Maybe some day.

@@StefanMilo You're doing excellent with what you have. Keep it up! 👍

@@StefanMilo Dude, I just love the meat-and-potatoes and your narrative, but hey, I can be transported by an hour long lecture with crappy PowerPoint slides.

Ahhh the spoon. Gone but not forgotten… 🥹

I was waiting for the spoon.

It might have sounded similar to the Jingle Dresses of Native American women.

That world was far from quiet

#sotrue

That’s so kind of you to say, I’m really glad you enjoy them. Lots more on the way!

Your family wasn’t “Christian” then, they were dogmatic. Nothing about this topic goes against scriptures and even if it did, it shouldn’t be censored. It’s just a summation of knowledge of what we know about specific humans based on their remains from a certain time in the past.

@@Steph-sk3xb It goes against Adam and Eve I’ve been told. If we evolved from monkeys than God didn’t make man is what I’ve been told. I’ve never really understood why we can’t have both but I’d rather not get grounded. 🤷‍♀️

@@Steph-sk3xb Christian fundamentalists would probably disagree with you. It is something to think about that religions who claim theirs is the only one true god seem to be, in their extremes, the most oppressive religions ever.

I cried at the realisation that the parent held up their child to make a handprint. It's such a beautifully intimate moment and you feel like you're peeking through the curtains of a window through thousands of years of time. It hits you like a brick wall: these were people. I just found that so overwhelming.

What is your job title?

What is this field called

@@jaydendubon1831 paleoanthropology

I never believed the presumption that prehistoric humans were primitives. Our ice age ancestors were not genetically unlike modern humans, They had language, art, music, religion, sophisticated tools and wore fine handmade clothing and shoes. There's evidence some engaged in agriculture, herding, and trade over great distances. They built shelters, villages, great monuments, and perhaps even cities. We are only beginning to learn.

Yes, the handprint is art! An artist's "signature" if you will, communicating to us whatever he/she wanted, now some 27,000, and much more, years ago, in some instances.

Or, perhaps, they are just handprints left by playful people who never imagined that your tweeting eyes would ever see them.

@@thomasjaggers3576 that may be even better!! :D

Watching the story of the handprints unfold was nice until when on unfolding the shear number of missing digits was revealed.

I'd heard the chopped off digits theory before. This time I looked at it as sign language. Or signs of language. When there is no written record, we guess a lot. Maybe a guild of wounded warriors meeting to share experiences. Stone knapping is dangerous. Very dangerous. Imagine how many cuts (in fingers) got infected.

I just came to make this comment. The intro up to minute 01:48 took me on such a journey in such a short time. I work as a wilderness mentor and will have a unit on storytelling coming up soon. Ill be taking notes from this channel for sure.

​@@PsillyShroomscool 🙂

Yes, it really shows what this medium is capable of when the intent is intellectual!! Much like this out there if you are inclined to seek it out. Unfortunately, lots of other useless stuff too!

I read I'm only 5.

That's a testament to our rapid intellectual and technical progress over the last 500 years.

It also shows how content we as humans can be to just survive but also how quickly we can change our environment when the going is good. We are perhaps so focused on thriving these days we are forgetting fundamentals about our nature which made us content for thousands of years when surviving.

@@UkSapyy idk if they were content. There was always the threat of starvation and high mortality rates & probably early forms of warfare. Life was short & brutal i think they just lived life the best they could in a shitty world

well said

I knoooow! I can’t lie, when I saw that I felt like a journalist that had been beaten to the story lol 😂

@@StefanMilo I first saw you as a suggestion because I watched North02, great job both of you!

I saw that video NORTH 02!

Love the way both of you guys present this type of content. Which is why I am subscribed to both channels lol.

well, now I know what I'M gonna watch next!

I think he died during hunting or in some kind of honorable duel to the death. His jaw was destroyed.

He died peeping on someone doing the naughty. They killed him.

Due to the damage to the jaw, archeologists have posited the idea that the little prince died from a bear attack

It definitely is, and yet to picture our distant ancestors as young children is probably the best way to humanise them.

She was probably long dead at the old age of 25.

@@mouthpiece200 that’s NOT what average lifespan means.

Learn to take a joke. :D

@@mouthpiece200 sorry, a lot of people are literally that dumb.

Its all good. :D

Same

I also would like to meet neanderthals. Were they smarter then us? They had bigger brains so maybe. Our ancestors thought they were sexy at least lol. And also homo erectus. The OGs who were around for like a million years.

You are not the only one who feels that way. I would of loved to see what the last common ancestor, we shared with Apes look like!

Imagine being a child and experiencing some shamanic ritual in a temple made of mammoth bones. So incredibly cool

@@Enjemnsnens for real! That whole time period fascinates me, when we first started to learn about farming, or just before and discovering new lands no human had ever been before. Walking through Eurasia and hunting mammoths, the world must have seemed to mysterious and magical, something completely different to us today that we can’t even imagine. They must have had some really wild rituals and spiritual practices, can’t even imagine what their conversations would have been like

Before farming. That quite recent.7000 years Go??

I'm sure Stefan would gladly accept a payment on Tuesday for a viewing today. [ Wimpy ;) ]

Stefan is very good. The channel reminds me of North 02, though more ancient human-focused as opposed to ancient megafauna.

the best youtube content by a Milo!

Toppermost of the poppermost!

It's not too young now. I don't mean this in the pervert way it might come off, but in regards to the survival of the species, age is just a number. If an individual was capable of producing the next generation.

@@michaelhowell2326 Placido Domingo is a modern example (not to be followed, except for lyric singing). But please don't think this would have the same non-impact on girls of the same age or the offspring, at least of modern ones (though the stats are pretty devastating among traditional societies including our earlier western ones). Maternal morbidity, mortality and sterility risks are way worse at 17 and younger, sharply inceasing as the age goes down. Infant outcomes are also much more often less than optimal.

History ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-7fNdxtjzg5A.html..k

When you mentioned that some baton samples suggest that ropes were run through the holes in the batons, Stefan, I immediately thought they could possibly be ratchets, for tightening ropes and cords. That would explain why the handles were sometimes madw with enhanced grips.

Both your Daniel's remarks seem to give a far more likely hypothesis than the other speculations, based on both real life observations of such a technique and the technical aspects of such tools. Occam's razor.

Yes. It's the everyday things that really matter: does our fishing boat stay afloat? Does our roof stay on during a winter storm? Stefan points out constantly that we must think about how totally different our ancestors' perspectives on daily life were. We take the humble and ubiquitous nail and screw for granted. In a time before fasteners, someone who could sew things together super tight would've been highly prized.

Agreed. IMO, people exploring the purpose of paleolithic artifacts are way too often leaning in the direction of seeing symbols of religion, afterlife or power, instead of thinking in terms of useful tools to facilitate a good life, in the conditions of that time. I'd even say that artifacts later gaining some metaphysical symbolism started as life-enhancing tools. Like when a hammer was great to have, long before it was included in a fantasy tale about mighty gods.

You are so lucky! What a fantastic site to have in your area. Imagine if you are in some way related to that person! That would be awesome. Probably not realistic but still a tiny possibility.

@@stephanieyee9784 my family is not from there, but given the immense span of time having passed it is likely that both of us may be his very distant collateral "relatives" (he died at a very young age so he probably hadn't children of his own). The place is sure agreeable, packed with housing and busy with people and traffic on the coast but also verdant and pleasant just above.

@@stefanodadamo6809 For most of Europe that would be very unlikely as those early populations, at least on the male side, had been entirely replaced by later waves of inhabitants. But in that area of Italy, some parts of Eastern Spain and Sardinia there are genetic descendants of Western HunterGatherers,. I don't know if they go back as far as this fellow, tho';

Thats not crazy at all- when there are no mirrors and noone has the tools to draw your face - the next best thing is taking your hand as a stencil. Kids as young as 2 know your hands change a lot over a lifetime and seeing theyre doing all the "handywork" (sorry lol) it just comes natural. When youre living a life without mirrors and screens the first thing you always see of yourself are your hands.

😂

I am vegan because I object to modern factory farming. It is hell on the animals and the environment.I would gratefully accept the offer of wild mammoth meat. The ice age hunter would have respected the animal he was eating.

@@canuckprogressive.3435 well sir or madam, I certainly respect that you’d accept it with gratitude lol I understand where you’re coming from with the industry, just not the lifestyle for me. Hope you didn’t take offense, just having some fun lol To each their own my friend.

@@Andy_Babb It's all good.

That illustration is pretty close to how European people looked at the time. They had come from Africa and the genetic mutations for light skin, blue eyes etc are much more recent than this dude.

@@atypical1000 That relies on assumptions that have not been proven beyond doubt. Also, just look at skulls in Europe found during the preceding Aurignacian period. They have no prognathism of the kind seen in this illustration. Did prognathism disappear between "leaving Africa," the Aurignacian, and then suddenly reappear during the Gravettian only to suddenly disappear again? I think it's just an inaccurate illustration.

@@atypical1000 the African climate was very different too though. Up to around 100,000 years ago the desert areas of modern times were a lot colder and wetter than it is now with forests and lush vegetation. It got steadily warmer and hotter until it eventually became what it is now. I don't really care about the skin colour argument personally, but I do often wonder if those ancient ancestors looked anything like how modern humans in the same location look given how different the climates were back then. This is such a fascinating topic but the massive environmental differences in the same location over the millennia (and how that may have effected the lives of our earliest ancestors) seems to be rarely spoken about! You often hear "our earliest ancestors roamed the baking African Savannah" and similar sentiments, when actually it was cool, wet, and covered in forests at that time. I'd love to see what it looked like, it must have been so beautiful :)

@@atypical1000 Will also add that all genetic components in modern Europeans were accounted for in European samples 37,000 years ago, with no East Asian DNA present. So the idea that we all kinda looked sub-saharan African(or more generally tropical) until a dozen-or-so years ago is not borne out by studies on the topic. It is an anachronism that undermines otherwise great content. This is the only place I've seen said figure depicted in this way too, so I can only see it as some kind of deliberate revisionism, dishonest marketing, or discomfort in depicting particular features. I clicked this video thinking it would be about a non-European figure. Unfortunately I was misled.

@@atypical1000 still, the skull shape isn't accurate....

We can communicate now, just not very well.

I will have to assume that you are joking. If you aren't, then there's nothing to stop you from living an archaic hunter-gatherer lifestyle if you really wish to, but I think that it would very quickly and forever stop you ever again from taking human progress for granted.

@@tsopmocful1958 No, I was not joking, especially about knocking the vegans!! LOL. And, many people do! And not just "primitive" tribes. I don't currently have the skills to do so myself. As Stefan says, they take a lifetime to develop. And I don't have a problem with so-called "human progress"; but it may lead to a "dead end", as current events unfold this year. So, hang on tight, over there in Europe; and everywhere else on this rock! Like the "prince", we may need some flint tools of our own manufacture soon! ;D

@@ronschlorff7089 What particular 'current events' are you referring to?

@@tsopmocful1958 WAR!!!

@@ronschlorff7089 This is an extraordinarily peaceful period that we are living in. There is less war right now than in any other time of history.

They didn't "mindlessly" kill animals. Ever see a Buffalo Jump, clearly not. Your description is elementary, over simplified and clearly based on your own bigotry & ignorance. Obviously your an Indian.

The fate that awaits us all.

The first archaeological record of white europeans is around 8000 years ago, and here we are talking 25,000 years ago and before

@@Maatkara1000 The prince of Arene Candide has more shared ancestry with modern 'white' europeans than with any other population on earth. You are incorrect.

@@labrana6974 Yeah, I am not wasting my time with someone biased against pure archaeology. You're suffering from the same colorism as the afroamericans that shout that Egypt was black. I suggest you go and search "Gravettian skin color" on Google and educate yourself a little bit

​@@Maatkara1000 What colorism? Arene Candide's skin colour is irrelevant to the issue of his morphometric affinities (which are to modern europeans)

@@Maatkara1000 User 'BLADE RUNNER's comment makes no mention of skin colour. But keep spamming your irrelevant google search which returned tertiary source/journalistic glossing of a subject I am far more knowledgeable and well informed-on than you.

The first llama herder? Or the 9000 year old huntress from Peru?

@@Aporio Oooh Peru one sounds good. Who was that?

Life of the first people that discovered Hawaii. Some polynesians lived their entire lives living on very small island/lagoons and they had very little knowledge of mountains on their islands, (with a few exceptions). Finding a land such as Hawaii would have been unlike anything else. Lands like these were only spoken in myth by their ancestors or from faraway traders. Just an idea :) Edit: Ok apparently there are a bunch of mountains in Tahiti that I didn't know about. Otherwise Hawaii is an incredibly remote and large island compared to the rest of polynesia.

@@stefansauer3148 I do need to make a video on Polynesia for sure. I've got a couple in mind

The Ancient North Eurasian culture fascinates me; as do the Tarim mummies.

You seem very sure about that :D

@Brandon Letzco It checks out, considering the scale of the game they were pursuing