Ice Age Europe – The Epic Transformation of Europe’s Landscape | Full Documentary

Ice Age Europe – The Epic Transformation of Europe’s Landscape | Full Documentary

[Music] Europe a familiar site but the continent  hasn’t always looked the way it does [Music] today it needed gigantic forces  to shape the land and its coasts masses of ice and water it seemed like there was nothing more  to discover about the old world but  

Spectacular scientific discoveries have  changed the way we look at Europe without   the ice ages it would be a very different  continent today fresh and crumble melt and   tble [Music] change Europe as we know it  it’s hard to imagine what it looked like  

Once upon a time but if we turn the clock back  a few thousand years the continent is hardly recognizable 450,000 years ago an ice sheet  several kilometers thick covered northern   Europe at its Edge the meltwater carried  by large rivers such as the rine and the  

Temps flowed into a huge meltwater  Lake between France and England from   there it pushed South to a huge line Stone  barrier that ran between what is Now cal and DOA it dropped over the edge in huge waterfalls  and carved deep plunge pools into the

[Music] Rock 450,000 years later it is these  pools that give scientists The crucial clue as   to which natural disaster once occurred between  Great Britain and France in the middle of what   is now the English [Music] Channel at Imperial  College in London geologist sanjie Gupta has  

Examined the seabed what we discovered was  extraordinary because we see these giant   Halls that are carved into rock in the center of  the DOA state that are now filled with sediment   and the only explanation the only way that  we can find to make these is that we had huge

Waterfalls here we have plunge Poes that are tens  of meters deep this plunge pole here is 90 M deep   carved into the Bedrock and several hundred  meters wide these are giant plunge poles that   require huge forces and a really large waterfall  to create them what they told us was that The Rock  

Ridge must have extended all the way from  Southern England Southeastern England all   the way to Northwestern France from DOA to Cal  and secondly that the water that supplied these   waterfalls must have come from a lake a giant Lake  that lay to the Northeast in the Southern North  

Sea the volume of water must have been immense  the reservoir had had around 2,000 years to fill the remains of the Great Barrier  can still be seen today in France they   are the chalk cliffs near Cala  in England the White Cliffs of DOA gupta’s Discovery immediately raised new

Questions the question is how did that  Gap that we see between England France   and the Sea the English Channel come to  be it’s normally been proposed that slow   erosion slow wearing back off these Cliffs  created that Gap through geological time but  

New findings from under the sea reveal  how that Gap was created what we see is   a sort of gorge like features that’s been  carved into the Rock and has smooth sides   and has a whole series of features which  are telltale signs of erosion by Mega

Floods the speeds of water there must have been  tens of meters per second flowing through these   uh Canyons that we see carved in the floor  of the English Channel so it would have   been really really dramatic we would have been  watching that waterfall erode with our own eyes basically

It might have only taken a few  weeks for the barrier to completely disappear All That Remains  are the Cliffs at DOA and Cal once the dam had disappeared people and  animals could only reach Britain during the   ice ages when the water level fell low  enough before then the straight tusked  

Elephant used to make it to the British  ises regularly during warm [Music] periods   scientists recently excavated one of its  skeletons in shuringan in Northern Germany   in a decommissioned opencast mine 300,000  years ago this was the shore of a lake  

Its sediment preserved the fossils so well  that they can still tell their stories today the straight tusked elephant was slightly larger  than today’s African savannah elephant it reached   a size of up to 4 M Nelly the female elephant we  excavated was a bit smaller we assume that Nelly  

Was in her mid-50s and that she died of natural  causes it is a common Phenomenon with elephants   that when they are sick or very old they like  like to walk in water because it carries part  

Of their weight so it is not unusual that an  elephant dies on the bank of a lake that is rather common the worn down teeth  of the lower jaw reveal its age the bones allow conclusions to be made  about the world in which the elephant cow

Lived on the bones we have found  bite marks of animals there are   distinct holes in the Bones from which we  conclude that large carnivores have made them we need to remember that at that time here  in Europe in Northern Germany there was a great  

Richness in species nowadays we have only three or  four large mammals at that time there were over 20   besides the elephants there were wild horses  or rocks and and also rhinos bison and many more those elephants that lived here were  not exotic at all the temperatures were  

Similar to today’s and they would still be able to  survive here today because they had fur and their   fat and circulatory system were adapted to the  habitat these elephants would feel right at home here this elephant species lived almost  exclusively in Europe in the warmer  

Regions it even survived the ice ages from  these Pockets it was able to repopulate the   north again and again every warm stage and  every Ice Age there were many mammals in   Europe Asia and North America almost all  of these became extinct or became almost  

Extinct when we the homo sapiens the Modern  Man moved into these areas their Extinction   certainly had something to to do with our  Behavior otherwise they would still be around when the Limestone barrier between  Great Britain and France came down 450,000  

Years ago large parts of Northern Germany  and Denmark were a long way from existing [Music] northern Europe lay under  thick ice this was advantageous   as sches Holstein and Jutland would  never have existed without the ice   only a few places that exist today were  around back then like the Calbag in bad

Zab the geologist Miriam Fifer knows why hin and Jutland consist of De that was brought  here by the glaciers of the Scandinavian ice   sheet these glaciers reached as far as Britain  at their base they scraped The Rock and carried  

Large amounts of rubble with them which they  piled up to what is now schik holin and Jutland   land the furrows that Scar the mountains in Norway  given idea of the force with which the Rocks were abraded the ice took rubble  and stones of all sizes and   transported them like a river to Northern

Germany a large part of the material that once   filled the fiords completely can now  be found in sches Holstein and Jutland without the glacial deposits schik holin would  be covered by sea today and only a few Islands  

Would protrude one of them is the culberg here  in zabber but also helal land and the mosome   cliff on zil particularly these islands because  they were pushed up by underground layers of salt the Deb traveled all the way to  Great Britain 300,000 years ago  

After that the ice gradually melted  back nevertheless it left behind not   just one pile of rubble but quite a  few in a row the so-called terminal Marines yeah do the ice has not simply expanded  and retreated uniformly but has retreated in many  

Steps and in between moved forward again  so by doing that it left several Marines   behind and produced a very typical chain of  Hills which today forms the sches holin Hill Country at the end of the zalo glaciation  126,000 years ago sches holin looked just  

As hilly in the west as it does today in the  East it would stay that way for about 60,000   years for the animals the melting of the ice  meant an increase in habitat as soon as the   ice was gone and the climate was a little  bit warmer they spread to the [Music] north  

The straight tusked elephant for example  made it to the island of Fon in Denmark   reindeer herds roam the whole of sches hin  they were more flexible than the elephant   and could already conquer the country  when this was only a cold and Barren

Tundra the archaeologist Mara ulia vber has  researched the distribution of reindeer in sches Holstein reindeer lived in the North  European Plain because here they found   good living conditions it was a Tundra with  herbs and some lyan which are especially   important for reindeer in winter that  provided the food they needed it was  

Actually a very typical reindeer habitat  as you might find it today in Canada or   on the fs in Norway or in [Music] Scotland  there used to be reindeer here too however   they had been extinct in these parts until a  private initiative reintroduced them in 1952  

Elizabeth Smith runs the project and knows how  important these animals are to the people of the north the reindeer that are in the northern  hemisphere throughout the subarctic and Arctic   basically man would not have moved to these  areas unless reindeer were there reindeer  

Provides man with everything provides them with  a source of food in many tribal people a source   of milk the Skins are used for clo clothing  they’re used for tents they are basically the   farm animal of the North in the permafrost  Tundra living off reindeer has always been  

One of the few options for long-term survival  hardly any other animal can handle the cold so [Music] well reindeer are a truly Arctic animal  the first thing is they have an amazing coat every   single hair is hollow and that that’s really  important because actually air is a very good  

Insulator so when a reindeer lies down on the snow  for example they don’t melt the snow they’re lying   on they don’t let the heat out and they don’t  let the cold in reindeer have about 2,000 hairs   per square cmet even under their Hooves and they  have another trick that protects them from cooling

Down they have an interesting countercurrent  system which is the war blood that’s coming away   from the body is passing Cold Blood coming away  from the extremities and there’s a crossover so   the warmth goes back into the body and their  extremities when you take their temperature  

Their extremities it’s it’s lower at their legs  than it is within the body so they’re conserving   heat all the time and that’s really important  to a reindeer while humans have to increase   their metabolism below 25° C to stay warm this  limit for reindeer isus 40° however they often  

Have a hard time finding food underneath the snow  the dart of a reindeer changes quite dramatically   through the seasons and in the winter time the  reindeer almost solely eat lyans and this is a   fungus with a symbiotic relationship with an  Alie and it grows on the ground it’s one of  

The only things that’s still growing under the  snow and reindeer will use their lovely big to   dig down through the snow to the lyom below  in order for them to do this their Hooves   transform depending on the season in summer  they have soft cushions in Winter they are  

Hard and angular so that they can scrape up  ice and snow and the eyes of the reindeer can   adapt as well they change their color so  that the animals can find their food more easily while the reflective surface behind the retina  is yellow in summer it turns blue in winter this  

Causes less light to be reflected and increases  the contrast in the Twilight of the Polar winter so a light green lyen in wide snow looks  more like a dark gray lyen against a white background 60,000 years ago the ice came back it was the  beginning of the last ice age however this  

Time it didn’t travel as far as the last time  in the middle of sches hin the glaciers came   to a halt about 25,000 years ago a wall of ice  stretched in a wide Ark from Poland to Denmark

He’s a clutch up the glacia was actually  part of a huge ice sheet we only see   the Foothills here the glacia was  about 300 M thick that is already enormous in Scandinavia it was more than  3,000 M thick higher than the matter horn  

All the time there was snow falling on its top  which froze over and added to its mass on its   way down here it continuously lost Mass due  to Melting so here you would only have some Foothills when the glaciers reached Eastern  sches hin 25,000 years ago they pushed up  

New ramparts of De this Eastern Hill  Country has been preserved to this day but back then such terminal Marines still  existed in the West too they were remains   from the previous Ice Age today there’s  no Trace left of them where did they go  

The Western Hill country originated from older  glacial deposits and these were simply washed   away by the meltwater of younger glaas this  meltwater formed Mighty Rivers they had a lot   of energy and could simply wash away both coarse  and fine components so that they were completely

Removed the water distributed sand and  deis on wide flat outwash Plains so-called Sanders this process can be simulated in an experiment the coffee grounds are intended  to show show how sediment is distributed   when melt water emerges from the glacia the  ice cubes are the melting glacia which is  

The source of the Melt water the water  represents the Melt water it flows very   quickly and reaches very high energies  which enable it to break through the Marine the coffee grounds show where the fine  sediment of the glacia is distributed you can  

See it is spread over a wide area and that the  water is transporting it long way but wherever   the water runs a little slower the sediment  is deposited and these wide flat Sanders are formed so due to this process all the  Marines from the previous Ice Age in  

The west of sches holin disappear  the Sandy outwash Plains become   the high Gees which is a name for  Barren land beyond that lies the Marshland it is this this vast and cold  Europe where the first modern humans   migrated to about 40,000 years ago Germany  and France are largely Tundra it’s so cold  

That there is an animal living here that  today can only be found north of the Arctic Circle the snowy Al its traces can be found  in southern France these birds seem to have   made an impression on the people of the  Ice Age It’s The Hunters of the so-called  

Magdalenian culture who live in France some of  their Rock carvings are said to depict snowy house in the Rocka Mador area the temperatures  often rise to more than 30° in summer it’s   hard to imagine the people once hunted  reindeer here and sometimes even snowy

Owls scientists are still wondering why  these people hunted the birds in the first   place after all there was little meat on an owl  archaeologist veronique larand is looking for an answer in general remains of snowy Els rather rare  but during the magdalenian period there are sites  

Where hundreds or even thousands of Bones were  found hunting snowy owls was not very efficient   the hunt used up energy but returned little  nourishment might the birds just have been prey of opportunity snowy owls were not  killed out of necessity or by  

Accident hunting this species was a  deliberate decision of the people of   that time food was sufficiently  available to them in the form of reindeer in the Valley of the door lies the cave   of k k this place might help to  solve the mystery of the snowy

[Music] owls many artifacts from  the magdalenian era have been found   in this cave among them were a lot of  reindeer bones but also bones of snowy Owls snowy owls don’t live here anymore  after all the landscape was very different   back then there was hardly any vegetation  the land resembled a [Music] tundra it   might have looked something like this in  France back then however it seems like   there weren’t any Snowy out chicks  living in the regions of the hunters

We’ve only recovered Bones from adult owls I’m assuming that the birds  only migrated here for the winter   time in their wintering grounds they  would not have [Music] brooded snowy   owls hatched their young in late summer  only then will they find enough Lemmings  

To race the chicks today their breeding  areas are far away from their wintering grounds at the national prehistoric  museum in Le de tayak the Ronique   lari examines the 30,000 year old snowy owl Bones from the way the hunters processed  the bones the archaeologist can conclude   that they were not necessarily after the meat

Under the microscope we can see numerous  tool marks of stone knives on the bones   these are extremely meticulous works and  some bones were decorated with [Music] ornaments but these people had a very  special interest which leaves us puzzled   they were particularly interested  in the claws they detached them and  

Took them along on their migration  the reasons are still a mystery to us whatever the reasons people invested a lot  of time and energy in processing the snowy owes they must have had a very special  relationship with these [Music] birds  

Whoever is lucky enough to observe one  of the last specimens of this species   might be able to understand  the fascination for the white ow even in the world of the ice ages there  were seasons and it’s not just the snowy owls  

That spent the winter in a different place to the  summer the reindeer also moved North for the warm season [Music] reindeer herder Elizabeth Smith knows the  migration flows of the animals reindeer react to   the season because it’s a change in in vegetation  a change in diet once the spring starts coming the  

Reindeer move north with the advance of spring  so every time they move north there’s a little   bit of fresh new vegetation to browse on once  they’re up there there they’ll spend time their   grazing before they start making this progress  back down in the Autumn during the rutting season  

And back to their winter grazing again in the  same way reindeer herds moved through Northern   Germany during the Ice Age they were followed  by hunters of the so-called Hamburg culture   archaeologist Mara ulia vber and her colleagues  excavated one of their tent camps in North

Thia these people were and gatherers who were  constantly moving throughout the year they didn’t   stay in one place but they went to certain places  at certain times where they expected good hunting conditions we are assuming that these  people planned exactly when and where  

They would be able to easily hunt reindeer with  reindeer it comes in handy that their herds on   migration have relatively predetermined  routs the people at that time knew how   to make use of this especially aon’s  as an example where we have about 20  

Sites of the Hamburg culture in a suitable  place for hunting this is certainly not a coincidence that is something we’re seeing  over and over again that the campsites were   located in such places where you would  have something like a bottleneck a narrow

Valley for the drive Hunt there are  examples from Greenland that have   inspired our idea of how hunting  was done here in arens [Music] we are assuming that whole families came here  together for a drive Hunt that would have been  

Very useful everyone had a role to play and  everybody was important for the success of the hunt reindeer have bad eyesight but a  good sense of smell so you would have   to position yourself in such a way that  they weren’t able to detect you from far

Away then this then there is one part of the group  that makes noise to drive the animals into the bottleneck there is another important characteristic  of reindeer when the herd leader has made it   through the bottleneck the rest of the herd  will follow this is actually the important

Moment and that is where the hunters are waiting  to take the animals down from the side and from [Music] behind in this well organized manner you  have to imagine a hunt taking place of course the   survival of the group depended on the hunt up  the hunters of the Hamburg culture traces of  

Them can be found in the Netherlands Denmark  Poland and even Scotland and they apparently   visited a rock that today lies far out at Sea  heligoland Germany’s only offshore [Music] island during the last ice age the red  monolith sat on dry land connected to  

The mainland and where its Sandy  sister Island lies today a second   Mountain overlooked the plain with  White Cliffs made of limestone and gypsum The Rock bore real Treasures Flint large  nodules from which tools and weapons could be made and the heligoland Flint had another special

Feature inside some of the  nodules were not gray but red whether the color made the stone particularly   valuable to the hunters is unknown  but they transported it over long distances in the 1990s a hobby archaeologist found   this processed Stone from heligoland  in a field near Lake Duma in lower

Saxony the archaeologists Stefan  vile and Jana Esa F have examined the finding we call such a piece a lithic core  it is a stone made of Flint by hitting this   core thin strips would detach the so-called  flakes from these flakes the actual tools  

Were created therefore athic core is  the raw material from which one would   make as many flakes as possible after  that it would be rubbish and would get discarded tools like knives refined from those  flakes only lasted a limited time before they wore

Out first I’m going to remove the cortex in aldorf  Schley kin Museum education officer vup Fifer is   trying to learn about Stone Age techniques by  using experimental archaeology now this is a beauty it’s important to hit the core at a  certain angle if I hit it down straight the  

Energy would run this way into the stone  and break it apart completely in order to   detach a slim flake I have to hit it from  this direction if I do so the energy will   travel right underneath the thin Lair  and the result will be a long and thin  

Flake temporarily Fifer often lives the everyday  life of a stone age person and knows their daily [Music] needs if a lot of flakes were needed  at once I would use up the core completely   and nap all the flakes I can get within  a few minutes the job would be done but  

If only two or three flakes were needed  I would keep the stone for later because   when you use the flakes for example when  cutting meat they get blunt very quickly   and of course they are the sharpest  when they come straight out of the

Stone the display of precise technology  changes the way we look at the simple stone age man this is another nice one a person who can nap wonderful little  flakes out of a stone must not be stupid or  

Clumsy this work relies on a lot of skills and  above all it has a lot to do with communication   you learn this skill over a period of many  years of course anyone can knock one stone   against another and somehow get a sharp edge  out of it but in order to purposefully create  

Flakes which have a very specific shape those  people had to be at least as intelligent as we are flakes made from Helo land Flint  they are rare in the whole of Northern   Germany there are only around a dozen  Stone Age artifacts made from heloan

Flint tools from the gry Flint are quite  common the archaeologists working with   Yana Esther freeze find them regularly the  lithic core from heligoland is something very special the special thing about it is that it  was found in dhama this lithic core must have  

Traveled from helgoland to Lake Duma that  is quite unusual of course this immediately   raises the question of how it got there has anyone  walked from Lake Duma to heland to find something   like this did people from helgoland travel to  trade these stones for something else did it  

Go through several hands that would also  be a possibility after all heligoland is   about 200 km away from the site near damama  at the time this was a considerably long distance the search for Clues resembles detective work there is a small indication that  the core was passed on through several  

Hands because has been intensively  worked on and revised several times   all of it could have been done by  the same person but that is not so likely whoever collected the  Stone from Helo land probably   transported it a short distance  and then passed it on to someone

[Music] else we are assuming that people  of the that time lived together in very   small groups there could have been a family  or maybe two or three families who stayed   together permanently and we reckon that they  might have met with other people every now  

And then perhaps at regular annual intervals  at these occasions things were exchanged news   was told and knowledge was passed on this might  explain how the heloan Flint could have changed hands through these changes the  use of techniques can spread over   extremely long distances and materials  can be passed on over several hundred

Kilom it’s obvious that they have met otherwise  the documented exchange of knowledge material   and Technology could not have happened so  indirectly we can conclude that there were   networks even in these times which we always  imagined to be very very simple people were  

In contact over very long distances  and this find from dama is proof of that about 15,000 years ago Europe  began to get warmer especially in summer the whole continent is changing what  used to be Tundra is slowly turning into a  

Bushy step it’s not a dense forest because the  herbivores move north too along with the plant Europe is full of large  mammals that keep the landscape open Wild Horses roam in large herds Red Deer are still solely living in the step and there is one animal that has long puzzled scientists the European

Bison there was no trace of these large mammals in   Europe until about 12,000 years ago  where did the Bison suddenly come from archaeologist Jil tosello recreates the   most famous caves in France he has  come across a wide variety of Bison

Representations the differences in bison  in Stone Age art from 40 to 10,000 years   ago are quite pronounced especially  the size of the shoulder area shows   differences as does the length of  the horns which can be larger or smaller for tacel these differences  are not just the whim of Stone Age  

Artists the Bison in the cave drawings  can be roughly divided into two Cate cies the main differences become  apparent when we compare the two   bison types we finding cave art so here we  have a bison with a long body and rather small

Horns it can be easily distinguished from  his cousin because that one has much higher   shoulders and above all huge cresant shaped  horns that stick out a long way from the head for a long time these differences  were simply dismissed one could  

Say the artistic skills of stone AG people  were not taken seriously that only changed   when a research team from the University of  Adelaide subjected fossil bison bones to a DNA test looking at the cave paintings we  have always assumed that they were a  

Result of free artistic interpretation  the surprising thing now is that these   representations actually are not  so much based on interpretation but   show two different species that are  reproduced in a relatively lifelike manner one of the species is the now extinct   step bison the other one is a  close relative of the European Bison the exciting thing is that the  fossil findings before 11,000 years   ago never showed any European bison at  all scientists had always wondered what   was prior to that before that time there was  only findings for the step bison the European  

Bison came out of nowhere so to speak with  the scientists discovery that was about to change as a result of the stud we discovered  an unknown lineage that we called Bison x   what really surprised us about the genetic  analysis of the new bison X was that on the  

One hand it was somewhat similar to the step  bison genome but on the other hand it also had   similarities to the Oro about 90% step bison  and 10% Oro and we were able to tell roughly   how the crossbreeding took place it was male step  bison that M with female Oro about 120,000 years

Ago and this happened even though the Oro  males likely guarded their herds as well   as this bull does it belongs to a group of  Taurus cattle which are set to resemble the orox the pedigree seems resolved males  step by some ated with female orox and  

SED the line of the so-called bison X from  which eventually emerged the European bison   the step bison became extinct around  12,000 years ago the Oro followed in   the 17th century when the Bison X was already  long gone today only the European bison is

Left Europe’s largest land mammal has become  rare only a few individuals are left in the wild the reindeer Hunters who followed the  animals towards Denmark in summer spend the   cold season in doggerland the vast plains  between Germany and Great [Music] Britain

But this year a catastrophe is looming  off the Norwegian Coast it will change   doggerland and Europe [Music] forever and  it will also have its effects on the British Coast geologist John Hill reconstructed the steps  that led to the disaster some 8,000 years [Music]

Ago off the coast of Norway there was a huge  underwater Landslide this it’s hard to imagine   how big this Landslide was it was 3,000 cubic km  if you want to take that amount of of sediment  

And place it on the UK you would cover the entire  of the UK with 10 m of sand so this one Landslide   as massive as it was generated a scenario that  then impact the entirety of the North Atlantic  

And the whole of the North Sea out the time the  scientist used a computer model to simulate the   ca of the tsunami so what we can see as the slide  uh moves down slope is a positive wave heading  

Off towards Greenland and that goes incredibly  quickly about the speed of a jumbo jet flying   across there then we also see the negative wave  coming back towards Norway and then the wave from  

Norway then heads down uh the North Sea it would  have been 2 to 5 m High when it hit the low-lying   land of doggerland at the time so you can see the  blue which is the wave coming out and then this  

Large Red Wave which is the incoming positive  wave washing over the Island then there’s a   bunch of smaller waves that come back this tsunami  could have been absolutely huge it could have uh   inundated 30 to 40% of the island if there were  coal communities uh living on the North edge of  

Dog land at the time they would have experienced  a huge amount of water the dogger Bank was overrun   completely and the waves also reached the coasts  if they were living there they would have been   quite a traumatic event I would imagine one of  the things we do know about uh the tsunami it  

Probably happened in the Autumn uh we’ve found  mosses in Norway and Cherry stones in Scotland   that both indicate that the sediments left by the  tsunami were deposited during the Autumn October   to November probably now that is going into the  harshest time for any misthic Community into  

Winter when there’s no food around so if it had  destroyed their fishing or their cashes of food uh   it could have been a really harsh winter combined  with the melting of large ice sheets in Canada   and Europe the tsunami was devastating the water  continued to rise and doggerland sank into the

Sea the warming of Europe continues where  previously was Tundra Forest is now slowly spreading more and more rain falls in instead  of snow this is a problem for the reindeer   their fur insulates so well that the risk of  overheating is greater than that of [Music] freezing scientific experiments on a treadmill  

Have shown that the animals can  control their Cooling in three stages in the first stage they accelerate  their breathing rate to 260 breaths per   minute the passing air cools the blood in  the sinuses which is pumped back into the  

Body if that’s not enough they pant like dogs  with their tongues hanging out the evaporation   cools the blood in it and the blood flow to  the tongue can even be increased for more efficiency however if the brain’s temperature  approaches 39° C it becomes critical at that  

Point there’s a third third stage where the  body directs cooled blood from the nose into   a network of blood vessels in the head here  too the animals have a heat exchanger the cold   blood cools the warm blood that flows from  the body to the brain in their cold habitat  

This cooling system is sufficient should they  have to make an escape from a predator but in   Central Europe where the temperatures are rising  it doesn’t help much here here they [Music] disappear European bison can take the heat much   better than reindeer they are  struggling with a different

Problem the steps in which they graze are  slowly being taken over by scrubland and Forest they manage to adapt the step  dwellers turn into forest animals the ice has largely disappeared from  Europe but the face of the continent   is still changing the coasts of the  Baltic Sea shift their course several

Times geologist Miriam Fifer looks at the  waterfill flansburg Fjord reflecting that   it was dry land back then these are canyons  and these canyons and Fields were formed by   glacier tongues that moved from Scandinavia  to Germany and scraped away a lot of rock  

When they melted they left gullies that  later filled up with water when the sea   level rose again it has only been 7,000  years that the Baltic Sea has its current [Music] shape 450,000 years of  alternation between warm stages and ice

Ages a lot has happened since the break  of the dam between France and Great Britain Europe a continent shaped by the ice  ages a gift of the [Music] glaciers the people   have changed their strategy instead of being  hunted ERS and gatherers they are farmers

Now unable to get their Vitamin D  from hunted prey their skin tone   has become lighter to produce Vitamin D from the sunlight with the shift of Agriculture  the birth rate is increasing hunting   alone could no longer feed everyone  now there is no going back to life  

As Hunter gather no going back  to the world of the ice ages and Crum melt and Tumble [Music] change crack crashing  breaking B sh [Music] ch

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The ice sheet that shifted from Scandinavia to Central Europe was massive. Measuring several thousand metres in diameter, it pushed rubble and debris across the continent to form Denmark and Northern Germany. Meltwater created a huge lake that broke through a chalk ridge connecting Calais to Dover, and separated France from Great Britain. France’s Channel coast emerged; Germany’s federal state rose from the ground. Europe truly is the gift of the glaciers.