A Freezer Wellstocked With Life
In spite of the cold, myriad animals and plants thrived in the open landscape, which stretched 10,000 km from Europe to North America.
Groups of huge mammoths grazed quietly side by side with huge, woolly rhinos. The landscape was full of flowers, and far away, where land and sky merged on the horizon, you could make out the edge of the ice cap, which separated the snowline and the fertile steppe. During the night, it was freezing cold, but in the daytime, temperatures rose to zero degrees C, and a cool, dry wind swept the flat ice-age steppe. Known as the mammoth steppe, the 20 million km2 region – as big as the USA and Canada combined – stretched some 10,000 km from Western Europe across Siberia to North America. All other regions in the Northern Hemisphere were buried in a thick layer of snow, and under such tough conditions, no animals nor plants could survive. But on the steppe, life was thriving. Until recently, scientists imagined the mammoth steppe to be a huge grassland. But DNA analyses of stomach contents and faeces from woolly rhinos and mammoths, plus 50,000-year-old plants from the Arctic permafrost, a new picture has emerged. Back in 2014, geneticist Eske Willerslev from the University of Copenhagen found that the steppe was more likely a "carpet" of herbs. His DNA analyses show that the vegetation
was highly diversified, primarily consisting of different species of flowering herbs, which are much more rich in protein than ordinary grass.
Just like on the African savannah, herbivores covered long distances searching for food, and they were followed by hunters armed with arrows and predators with sharp teeth and a healthy appetite. To all of them, the mammoth steppe was a huge buffet. Small and large animals existed side by side, and just like modern giraffes and zebras, the four-legged steppe inhabitants were interested in different types of food. The mammoth preferred herbs, whereas the cave bear liked juicy berries, and sabre-toothed tigers loved red meat.
About 10,000 years ago, the high-protein herbs were almost gone, probably due to an extraordinarily cold and dry period, which had began 20,000 years ago, when global temperatures plummeted. Bushes and grass filled the tundra, and over time, the herbs succumbed, and so did the animals, which primarily fed on herbs.