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years of our planet’s history, glaciation has been at work. Even today its causes – the reasons why Earth has sometimes hurtled through the universe as a giant snowball
– are not fully understood.
    The seemingly random descent into an Ice Age may be partly a result of the shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun. More than four billion years ago when Earth was a relative newborn, still
a glowing, cherry-red ball of molten rock, something of similar size thumped into it like a giant fist. The force of the punch knocked out a mass of molten material that later solidified to form
the Moon – and also jolted Earth out of kilter so that rather than sitting in an upright position as before, it reeled slightly backwards.
    In spite of the blow, despite being juddered out of true by many degrees, the planet kept spinning. More importantly in terms of the conditions that enable continent-wide ice flows to form, the
impact also changed Earth’s orbit from a circular path into an oval form best described as an ellipse; and so during the course of our year-long waltz with a star we are sometimes close to
our dance partner, sometimes further away. It seems that when other conditions on Earth conspire we are sometimes long enough out of the spotlight to let the ice take an unshakeable hold.
    The northern hemisphere in particular has known the violence of theice again and again during the last three million years – long, cold glacials interspersed with
shorter, warmer interglacials.
    The uncomfortable truth is that we are presently enjoying one of those summer holidays from the ice – and have been for the past 11,500 years or so. During the last 750,000 years the
glacial cold spells have tended to be longer and more severe than ever before, each one lasting for an average of 100 millennia. The most recent – the one spotted by Agassiz – was at
its peak just 21,000 years ago. What he identified was almost literally just the tip of the iceberg.
    The Red Laddie and his fellows looked up at Yellow Top and the rest of Paviland from an utterly different world. He lived and died during a time classified by archaeologists as the Upper
Palaeolithic – towards the end of the Old Stone Age – and may have shared his version of Europe with just a few tens of thousands of people. In his time, 30,000-odd years ago, it was a
landmass on a downward spiral towards another Ice Age. Great sheets of ice were advancing from the north and, with so much water locked up inside them, the sea level was significantly lower than
today. Although the Paviland caves are on the coast now, 33,000 years ago the sea was perhaps 70 or 80 miles further away. Paviland looked out, not over rolling waves but across a low-lying plain
that stretched far off into the horizon and beyond.
    The land now known as Britain was not an island then, but a peninsula of north-west Europe peopled by nomadic hunters in thrall to the animals upon which their very existence depended. The
beasts moved in great migratory herds, reindeer and wild horse – and also another species, parts of which had been buried near the young man’s grave in Goat’s Hole Cave. For the
skull, bones and ivory recorded by Buckland had come not from any tropical elephant, but from a tundra-dwelling Ice-Age mammoth.
    In his report of his excavations at Paviland, in Relics of The Flood , Buckland included a careful plan that clearly showed the ‘elephant’ skull lying close by the human
skeleton. But sometime not long after their discovery, the animal’s remains became separated from those of the more infamous Red Laddie and for the best part of two centuries they went their
separate ways. For almost all of that time the mammoth bones were presumed lost. Only when curators in a Swansea museum began going through the contents of some long-neglected boxes, in 2009, did
the light of day fall upon the beast once more. Mammoth tusks and bones were found, together with around 300 other animal