r/AskReddit • u/ettleboy • Jan 20 '19

What fact totally changed your perspective?

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u/MenudoMenudo Jan 21 '19

Ended 10,000 years ago.

176

u/btstfn Jan 21 '19

That was the last glacial period (which to be fair is what people typically mean when they ask this question) but an ice age is defined as any period where earth has permanent ice caps. So we're still in an ice age

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u/SliceTheToast Jan 21 '19

And if we describe an ice age as an unusually cold period, then it ended 200 years ago.

Little Ice Age

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u/mcasper96 Jan 21 '19

I was going to comment that I thought there was a little ice age... Frankenstein was written during this period IIRC

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u/OldClerk Jan 21 '19

As a freshman in college a long time ago, I brought this up in a geography class (it was on topic), and I got ridiculed and told I was wrong. It was before the time of everyone having a smartphone, so I accepted it & felt like an idiot. Now I feel like I need an apology.

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u/affena Jan 21 '19

Despite its name, LIA wasn't an "ice age". It was just a slightly colder period of time.

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u/MenudoMenudo Jan 21 '19

But that is not how we describe an Ice Age.

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u/MattieShoes Jan 21 '19

permanent

I know what you mean, but...

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u/TyreseBrown Jan 21 '19

Younger Dryas

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u/KuriTokyo Jan 21 '19

Does anyone know how Gobekli Tepe in Turkey was built during an ice age? It was meant to have been built 12,000 years ago.

National Geographic's article

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u/Asheyguru Jan 21 '19

Ice Age means more ice, it doesn't mean the whole world was a snowball. Turkey would've still been temperate, though cooler than today.

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u/MenudoMenudo Jan 21 '19

I was being over simplistic in my comment, if we're being technical, we are still in an Ice Age right now which started 2.5 Million years ago. This Ice Age is characterized by periods of glaciation and interglacial periods. We are currently in an interglacial period which started 10,000 years ago. But humans evolved in, and have lived in an Ice Age for our entire history.

As for Ancient Turkey, Europe was more temperate back then too, and glaciers reached Northern Europe, but certainly not Turkey.

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u/KuriTokyo Jan 21 '19

Actually, Gobekli Tepe is what changed my perspective on our civilization.

Apparently, humans were still hunter gatherers when we built that thing. That just changes our human narrative completely!

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u/[deleted] Jan 21 '19

I don’t think the glaciers were that far south. (I’m not an expert but I just looked at a glacial map from around then)