Ice Age Europe and the World She Knew

Understanding Zlatý kůň requires some appreciation of the world she actually inhabited — a world so different from the present as to strain the imagination, but a world in which fully modern humans lived fully human lives.

Forty-five thousand years ago, Europe was in the midst of the Late Pleistocene — the cold epoch that would culminate in the Last Glacial Maximum around 22,000 years ago, when ice sheets covered much of northern Europe and sea levels were dramatically lower than today.

But the period around 45,000 BP was not the coldest part of this epoch.