Hunting was never something I thought I’d do. Yet I spent months last year tracking down some rare and elusive prey – and I was carried along by the thrill of the chase.
But this was a hunting expedition with a difference. I was filming with the BBC’s Natural History Unit and we were shooting with cameras, not guns. We weren’t even after live animals.
The beasts we were looking for had been extinct for thousands of years, but once roamed freely during the last Ice Age, which reached its icy peak about 20,000 years ago.
With a small team, I travelled widely throughout the northern hemisphere, to North America, Greenland, central Europe and Siberia, picking up traces of these animals for the programme Ice Age Giants, in which we not only explore what happened to these huge beasts, but bring them back to life with stunning computer-generated images.
With a small team, I travelled widely throughout the northern hemisphere, to North America, Greenland, central Europe and Siberia, picking up traces of these animals for the programme Ice Age Giants
The series starts in North America where, south of the vast ice sheets, it was a golden age for massive mammals. There were around 30 species of herbivore weighing more than 300kg – that’s larger than a moose.
And seven species were larger than any living mammal in America today, including behemoths like Columbian mammoths. Altogether, it was a richer and more impressive array of large animals than you’d see on a typical safari in Africa.
Although we often filmed in quite remote places, tracking down some of these North American beasts took us right to the heart of Los Angeles – to the La Brea Tar Pits. Palaeontologists have dug out the preserved bones of thousands of Ice Age animals that met a sticky end by wandering into pools of asphalt there.
There are well over three million specimens, representing more than 650 species of plant and animal including giant sloths, mammoths and mastodons – and the stars of the first programme of the series: sabre-tooth cats. These cats were the top predators in Ice Age America. They probably killed by slashing at the throat of their prey with their dagger-like canines – holding the unfortunate animal down with their incredibly strong forelimbs.
Europe was hit hard by freezing temperatures, with vast ice sheets in the north and swathes of tundra. For the second episode we filmed deep in the snowy Apuseni Mountains of Romania in search of one of the most formidable beasts of the period: the cave bear.
I descended into the depths of a cave with palaeontologist Marius Robu. We squeezed through impossibly narrow passages and shimmied down crevices until we got to a passage that suddenly plunged vertically down.
We descended using a narrow steel-wire ladder and at the bottom we faced a near-vertical wall of clay. I was astonished to see it was covered in deep scratches. Thousands of years ago, cave bears had fallen into this sink hole – and these were the marks of their desperate attempts to scramble out. It was chilling.
The stars of the first programme of the series: sabre-tooth cats
The evidence preserved in the cave was astonishing. At some point in the distant past, a river had flowed through the cave, covering the walls and floor in a layer of clay. Claw-marks, paw prints and even the impression of fur where a bear had squeezed through a narrow passage had been pressed into this clay.
And then the cave was naturally sealed, so that thousands of years after cave bears became extinct, their traces remained for Marius to find.
The bones help palaeontologists to understand cave bear biology and behaviour. But deep inside the cave, there were more surprises. Marius had found bones belonging to another extinct Ice Age species: the cave lion.
I assumed they had been in the cave for shelter, like the bears, but Marius told me he thought the lions were there to hunt the bears. I was taken aback. Cave bears were about 30 per cent larger than modern brown bears – much bigger than cave lions. Desperation must have driven the lions to hunt such dangerous prey – and some of them met their match in the cave.
So, when Ice Age Giants comes to BBC2 next week, you won’t have to imagine that fight scene between a cave bear and a cave lion – you’ll be able to watch it in stunning CGI.
In this particular scene, you’ll see the cave lion stalking the cave bear in the dark, as though filmed with night vision technology. And although some cave lions might have successfully preyed on old bears or cubs, the lion in our sequence has certainly bitten off more than it can chew.
What’s astonishing is that many of these animals made it right through the last Ice Age, some surviving until 10,000 years ago or even less. So why are they now extinct?
Having met this great cast of characters, you can’t help but feel it should be more than just their ghostly traces that we see in the landscape today. Some experts have blamed climate change, others have pointed to human hunting as the main threat to the survival of the great Ice Age animals.
The debate has raged for decades, and I went in search of answers for the last programme of the series.
If you want to find out why these incredible, awesome creatures are no longer with us, you’ll just have to watch Ice Age Giants.
Ice Age Giants, 19 May, 8pm, BBC2.
Source link : https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2321961/amp/Ice-age-killers-Using-stunning-CGI-new-brings-life-fearsome-predators-20-000-years-ago.html
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Publish date : 2013-05-10 03:00:00
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