The Long Way Back to Ourselves

2.1

The End of the Ice Age: A Climate History of the Holocene

This episode traces the climate record locked in Greenland ice cores, analyzed by glaciologist Richard Alley, showing the last ice age ended not gradually but in abrupt jumps of several degrees within decades. It corrects the assumption that early humans became farmers because they were clever: the Natufian culture settled without sowing a single seed, living on wild grain dense enough during a warm spell to last a year. You hear how the Younger Dryas cold snap, beginning around 12,800 years ago, pressured these communities, and how excavations at Abu Hureyra show wild food shrinking just as cultivated grain traits appear. The point is that a stable climate, not superior intelligence, let planning pay off.