CHANGES AT THE END OF THE ICE AGE
The last great glaciation of the Ice Age was a two-part affair, with a sub-phase at the end of the second part. In Europe the last sub-phase of this glaciation commenced somewhere around 15,000 years ago. Then the glaciers began to melt back, for the last time. Remember that Professor Antevs ([p. 19]) isn’t sure the Ice Age is over yet! This melting sometimes went by fits and starts, and the weather wasn’t always changing for the better; but there was at least one time when European weather was even better than it is now.
The melting back of the glaciers and the weather fluctuations caused other changes, too. We know a fair amount about these changes in Europe. In an earlier chapter, we said that the whole Ice Age was a matter of continual change over long periods of time. As the last glaciers began to melt back some interesting things happened to mankind.
In Europe, along with the melting of the last glaciers, geography itself was changing. Britain and Ireland had certainly become islands by 5000 B.C. The Baltic was sometimes a salt sea, sometimes a large fresh-water lake. Forests began to grow where the glaciers had been, and in what had once been the cold tundra areas in front of the glaciers. The great cold-weather animals—the mammoth and the wooly rhinoceros—retreated northward and finally died out. It is probable that the efficient hunting of the earlier people of 20,000 or 25,000 to about 12,000 years ago had helped this process along (see [p. 86]). Europeans, especially those of the post-glacial period, had to keep changing to keep up with the times.
The archeological materials for the time from 10,000 to 6000 B.C. seem simpler than those of the previous five thousand years. The great cave art of France and Spain had gone; so had the fine carving in bone and antler. Smaller, speedier animals were moving into the new forests. New ways of hunting them, or ways of getting other food, had to be found. Hence, new tools and weapons were necessary. Some of the people who moved into northern Germany were successful reindeer hunters. Then the reindeer moved off to the north, and again new sources of food had to be found.