GLACIERS CHANGE THE WEATHER

Great sheets of ice change the weather. When the front of a glacier stood at Milwaukee, the weather must have been bitterly cold in Chicago. The climate of the whole world would have been different, and you can see how animals and men would have been forced to move from one place to another in search of food and warmth.

On the other hand, it looks as if only a minor proportion of the whole Ice Age was really taken up by times of glaciation. In between came the interglacial periods. During these times the climate around Chicago was as warm as it is now, and sometimes even warmer. It may interest you to know that the last great glacier melted away less than 10,000 years ago. Professor Ernst Antevs thinks we may be living in an interglacial period and that the Ice Age may not be over yet. So if you want to make a killing in real estate for your several hundred times great-grandchildren, you might buy some land in the Arizona desert or the Sahara.

We do not yet know just why the glaciers appeared and disappeared, as they did. It surely had something to do with an increase in rainfall and a fall in temperature. It probably also had to do with a general tendency for the land to rise at the beginning of the Pleistocene. We know there was some mountain-building at that time. Hence, rain-bearing winds nourished the rising and cooler uplands with snow. An increase in all three of these factors--if they came together--would only have needed to be slight. But exactly why this happened we do not know.

The reason I tell you about the glaciers is simply to remind you of the changing world in which prehistoric men lived. Their surroundings--the animals and plants they used for food and the weather they had to protect themselves from--were always changing. On the other hand, this change happened over so long a period of time and was so slow that individual people could not have noticed it. Glaciers, about which they probably knew nothing, moved in hundreds of miles to the north of them.

The people must simply have wandered ever more southward in search of the plants and animals on which they lived. Or some men may have stayed where they were and learned to hunt different animals and eat different foods. Prehistoric men had to keep adapting themselves to new environments and those who were most adaptive were most successful.