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Step back in time by just 20,000 years and the world is a very different place. Vast swathes of the northern hemisphere are covered by ice sheets, glaciers carve great valleys through the landscape and continents merge as sea levels fall. Hairy beasts and ferocious predators rule, while immense animals migrate across vast, unfamiliar landscapes. With unique access to excavations and state of the art forensic analysis and spectacular CGI, Ice Age Giants travels back to a land before time to reveal the Ice Age through the eyes of the animals that lived there.. Step back in time by just 20,000 years and the world is a very different place. Vast swathes of the northern hemisphere are covered by ice sheets, glaciers carve great valleys through the landscape and continents merge as sea levels fall. Hairy beasts and ferocious predators rule, while immense animals migrate across vast, unfamiliar landscapes. With unique access to excavations and state of the art forensic analysis and spectacular CGI, Ice Age Giants travels back to a land before time to reveal the Ice Age through the eyes of the animals that lived there.. Episode 1 - Land of the Sabre-Tooth
Professor Alice Roberts journeys 40,000 years back in time on the trail of the great beasts of the Ice Age. This was the last time that giants like mammoths, woolly rhinos, and sabre-tooth cats ruled our planet. Drawing on the latest scientific detective work, and a dash of graphic wizardry, Alice brings the Ice Age Giants back to life.
Alices Ice Age odyssey begins in the Land of the Sabre- tooth North America, a continent that was half covered by ice, up to two miles thick. Yet, it also boasts the most impressive cast of Ice Age Giants in the world.
High in a cave in the Grand Canyon, Alice discovers the mummified poo of the loveable, grizzly bear-sized Shasta ground sloth.
Lying in the sands of Arizona are the shelled remains of a Glyptodont, surely the weirdest mammal that ever lived.
On the coastal plains of California Alice encounters the vast Columbian mammoth larger than any elephant today.
These leviathans all have one thing in common: They are stalked by the meanest big cat that ever prowled the Earth. Armed with 7-inch teeth and hunting in packs, beware of Smilodon fatalis, the sabretooth cat.
Episode 2 - Land of the Cave Bear
In Land of the Cave Bear, Alice ventures to the parts of the northern hemisphere, hit hardest by the cold Europe and Siberia. High in the mountains of Transylvania, a cave, sealed for thousands of years reveals grisly evidence for a fight to the death between two starving giants, a cave bear and a cave lion. These animals, which would dwarf their modern day relatives, were probably driven into conflict by the pressure on food supplies, as the Ice Age gathered pace. But Alice also discovers that, for woolly rhinos and woolly mammoths, the Ice Age created a bounty. The Mammoth Steppe, a vast tract of land which went half way round the world, provided food all year round, for those that liked the cold. It was these mammoths that Europes most dangerous predators Neanderthals and our own species, hunted for their survival.
Episode 3 - Last of the Giants
Astonishingly, even after thousands of years of ice crushing the northern hemisphere and temperatures of 20 degrees lower than those of today, many of the great giants of the Ice Age still walked the Earth. It was only when the world had warmed up again that mammoths, woolly rhinos, sabre-tooth cats, giant ground sloths and glyptodonts finally went extinct. Professor Alice Roberts sets off on her last voyage back to the Ice Age, to discover why. Alice learns the moving story of a mother mastodon (an extinct relative of the elephant). From her tusks alone, scientists can tell how many calves she had and whether they reached adulthood. This evidence, together with harrowing injuries on other skeletons tells a perplexing story of a species on the edge of extinction mastodons were turning on mastodons. By looking at the behavior of elephants today, scientists have come up with a surprising theory of why this happened. The woolly rhino tells another story. Believe it or not, the one thing it couldnt stand was snow - which stopped it from getting enough grass. During the Ice Age in Europe and Siberia, snow was thin on the ground as so much water was locked up in the ice sheets. But when the ice age ended, the snows increased, rhinos found themselves stuck and their little legs were unable to get them out of trouble.
