All language subtitles for Titans.of.the.Ice.Age.2013.1080p.BluRay.x264.DTS-HD.MA.5.1-SWTYBLZ

Twenty thousand
years ago,

the world was in the grip
of an ice age.

Much of the northern hemisphere
was blanketed by snow

and crushing glaciers,
miles thick.

An iced earth.

Great beasts,

some familiar and
some strange, lived here.

Adapted for the
punishing cold.

This was the world
of the mammoths.

Kingdom of the titans.

An age of ice.

These bones
belonged to giants,

but unlike dinosaurs,
these animals,

shared the planet with humans.

We can only imagine
their strange calls

that once haunted the dreams
of our ancestors.

What happened to these great
beasts that once walked among us?

Why was extinction their fate?

The stories of their lives
continue to unfold,

as strange new creatures
are uncovered.

In 2007, a reindeer herder
in northern Russia

discovered this mummified
baby woolly mammoth.

She had been buried
and frozen for 42,000 years.

Her skin and organs, some fur and even
her eyes are extremely well-preserved.

Her tiny tusks,
not yet visible.

Named lyuba,

she is the most
intact mammoth ever found.

And a rare window
to our frozen past.

Two and a half million years ago,
an ice age began with a snowflake.

One of nature's
most beautiful creations.

One by one they fell,
billions upon billions.

Blanketing the north,

chilling the planet.

The pleistocene epoch, our
most recent ice age, was born.

Our story begins near the
end of the last ice age,

roughly 20,000 years ago.

It was an environment
well suited to giants.

Woolly mammoths.

This icon of the pleistocene
spread through Europe, Siberia,

and into northern parts
of north America,

roaming grasslands
called the mammoth steppe.

It is likely the herds
were constantly on the move,

seeking their
favorite vegetation.

Individuals eating
up to 400 pounds per day.

Similar to her
elephant cousins,

baby lyuba would have lived in a
family clan of about 10 members,

protected by a dominant
female, the matriarch.

Standing up to 10 feet and
weighing as much as eight tons,

woolly's huge mass helped
them to retain body heat.

Three layers of hair and wool,
a layer of insulating fat,

and small fur-lined ears also
helped them cope with the cold.

Massive curved tusks,
up to 16 feet long,

could be used as plows to reach
grass buried under the snow.

The calves were curious and playful,
but vulnerable to predators,

and always under the watchful eye
of their mother.

Sometimes a male bull would challenge
another for dominance of the herd.

A clash of these titans
could be a violent affair.

Since the birth of our planet,
the climate has been changing,

cycling, temperatures
rising and falling.

There have been at least
five major ice ages.

Some may have covered
the whole planet in ice.

Climate cycles have been
fundamentally shaped by variations

in the earth's orbit
over time.

These variations alter the way
the sun strikes the earth,

and can lead to cooling
on the surface.

As the ice caps grow,

they act as a mirror, reflecting more
sunlight away from the shining ice,

causing heat to escape
from the atmosphere.

So cooling speeds up,
then more ice,

more reflection
and more cooling.

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
such as methane and carbon dioxide

counterbalance the cooling, trapping
the sun's heat like a greenhouse

around the planet.

Volcanoes can produce
these gases naturally.

Plants and trees recycle the
gases and keep them in check.

Too much greenhouse gas,
and the planet can warm.

Too little, and it cools.

Each of these factors,
the earth's orbit,

angle to the sun
and atmosphere,

all work together
to shape earth's climate.

This is the
clockwork of nature.

Even the tiniest variation
can tip the scale

with profound consequences.

During our most
recent ice age,

glaciers blanketed the north.

But most wildlife
lived south of the ice sheets

on vast grassy plains.

The grasslands supported
immense herds of grazers.

Like today,
there were seasons,

but each was about
16 degrees fahrenheit cooler,

and with so much water
locked up in ice,

there was less snowfall
on the plains.

Animals we know today,

lived among mammoths,
mastodons and big cats.

The plains of ice age Europe,
Asia and north America

were like the
African serengeti.

And like the serengeti,

where there are grass eaters,

there are meat eaters.

Dire wolves.

These intelligent, social carnivores,
lived and hunted in packs.

At up to 150 pounds,

they were more powerfully built
than today's gray wolves.

And they were
aggressive hunters.

The wolves are not alone.

Sabre-toothed cats
smell the fresh kill,

and an opportunity.

With large curved fangs and nearly twice
the weight of a modern African lion,

they are the top predator.

During the pleistocene epoch,

so much of the earth's water
was frozen into the ice caps,

that sea level dropped by over
300 feet, connecting continents.

Many ice age animals arrived
in north America from Siberia,

over this land bridge,
called beringia.

But they were not the only
ones to discover the passage.

Humans made their way to this
vast, untamed continent.

Though not physically equipped
for a harsh and bitter climate,

our intelligence,
curiosity and language

allowed us to cope
with new challenges.

Ice age humans were the first to leave
symbolic records of their lives.

Their drawings, mostly
found in European caves,

evoke a world of fire and ice,

of mammoths,

bison

and horses.

As the ice age giants
disappeared,

the bones they left behind fueled
wild and chilling speculation.

Siberians imagined that hulking
skeletons rising from melting ice

must belong to giant moles
that lived in hell.

A mammoth's skull may have been
the inspiration for the cyclops

of Greek mythology.

Even early attempts by scientists
to assemble mammoth bones

were often just as wild.

Scientists were equally confounded
by massive boulders standing alone.

After centuries
of speculation,

geologists determined that the
boulders, called "erratics,"

had been carried thousands
of miles on rivers of ice,

and left behind
when the ice melted.

And the mysterious bones
from mythology

belonged to extraordinary
animals from that lost world.

One unusual place,

hidden within the
ice age scrub lands,

tells an exceptional, though grim, story.

Tar pits.

A columbian mammoth, lured by
drinking water, has perished,

likely from dehydration
and exposure

after getting trapped
in the tar.

Its carcass is of interest
to this sabre-toothed cat.

She's hungry.

A mammoth is a temptation
worth the risk.

On this day, the tar has
claimed another victim.

And the smell of death
attracts others.

For forty thousand years,
countless predators and prey

were mired in this deathtrap.

Their bones sinking into and
preserved by the tarry asphalt.

Bones that continue to be pulled
from the la brea tar pits today,

in the heart
of downtown Los Angeles.

Walls now surround the tar pits to allow
the bones to be safely excavated.

These sticky deposits were naturally
formed when asphalt, deep in the earth,

gradually rose to the surface,
seeping into pools.

Since 1906, more than
three millions fossils

have been recovered
from over 400 species.

Making this one of the world's richest
repositories of ice age animals.

I've never seen that before.

In a glass-walled lab
called "the fishbowl,"

la brea paleontologists and volunteers
separate ice age fossils from the tar.

They're exposing the skull and
jaws of their biggest find yet,

a nearly complete mammoth.

Discovered under
a nearby parking lot,

the team has named him zed.

La brea's tar is an ideal
medium to preserve bone.

It penetrates them, protecting everything,
from the most delicate bird bone

to zed's 200-pound skull.

The bones are so saturated that tar
continues to ooze from zed's skull today.

From the size, width and condition
of his two large molars,

they confirm zed is a male.

A columbian mammoth,

who was between 48 and
52 years old when he died.

When zed's 10-foot tusks
were excavated,

they were encased in a
protective jacket of plaster.

As the plaster is removed,

the tusks are seen
for the first time

in possibly 40,000 years.

Ice age secrets
come in all sizes.

As the asphalt matrix is
cleaned from tar pit fossils

like this dire wolf skull,

it is sorted and what remains

is a treasure trove
of tiny micro fossils.

In this spoonful of sediment are the
fossilized bones from two snakes,

a mouse elbow,
and the legs of two beetles.

Even plant seeds
and leaves are found.

These micro fossils are a record of
what lived in the la brea ecosystem

40,000 years ago,

and clues to the environment
and climate at the time.

Zed may have been attracted to
la brea's marsh-like setting,

unaware of its hidden dangers.

Once he stepped in,
his fate was sealed.

Some creatures trapped in la
brea's tar were quite bizarre.

A shasta ground sloth.

This furry plant eater roamed the
American west and northern Mexico.

It's massive fore claws may have helped
to fend off sabre-toothed attacks.

Though it was as big
as a black bear,

it had relatives that were 20 feet
long and weighed 6,000 pounds.

But the shasta is best known

for the unlikely climate clues
it left behind

in the darkness of caves.

Sloth dung is so
well-preserved in some caves

that it smells like
fresh manure when broken open.

The content of the dung reveals
what these animals ate.

Knowing their diet
and the age of the dung,

scientists can track how vegetation
and climate was changing.

Larger and less hairy
than their woolly cousins,

columbian mammoths ranged
all across north America

and into present-day Mexico.

In some places, the warm
waters of natural hot Springs

lured them to succulent
grasses, even in winter.

But a misstep could be fatal.

There was no escape from
these steep, slippery sides.

Over thousands of years, the
hot Springs turned into this.

An ice age tomb
in south Dakota.

It holds the largest concentration
of mammoths ever found.

Looking like an ancient
burial ground,

57 columbian mammoths,
three woolly mammoths,

and 28 other ice age animals
have been discovered.

Dozens more lie buried still.

One by one,
mammoths died here,

over a period
of several hundred years

near the end of the ice age.

The position of this mammoth,
facing upward with limbs sprawled,

is sad witness that he died
while struggling to climb out.

Every bone here tells a
story, like a diary.

Even ancient tusks give us information
about the mammoth's life.

Tusks are made of a hard
material called dentin,

similar to our teeth.

Each year of tusk growth is
recorded in a layer of dentin,

like a tree ring.

A cross section
of the tusk shows

that in years with good
climate and plenty to eat,

tusks grew faster
and rings are thicker.

In times of severe weather and
less food, the rings are narrow.

Mammoths grew six sets of teeth over
their roughly 60-year lifetime,

like elephants today.

By determining which
teeth were present,

we can know the mammoth's
age when it died.

Understanding the health and age
of the mammoths helps us to know

what was happening
in their environment.

Curiously, the bones at the mammoth
site reveal another interesting fact.

All of the mammoths that
perished here were young males.

Perhaps a little more adventurous
and a little less cautious

than the female and adults.

Hot Springs and tar pits preserve
many clues about ice age animals,

but these traps did not
cause a mass extinction.

Something else was happening at
the end of the last ice age.

The world of the mammoth
was warming.

Animals adapted for a cooler climate
faced a changing landscape.

Forests encroached on the grasslands,
altering the food chain.

And just as a warming planet
created ecological challenges,

another new threat
to wildlife appeared.

A mammoth was no match
for human Spears.

Mammoth gifts of food and fur and bone
were invaluable survival resources,

but our greatest
adaptation to winter

was the remarkable human mind

and the ability to tame
the world around us,

to harness the power of fire
and flint and bone.

Our ancestors met the cold
with a burst of innovation.

They crafted bone tools and needles
to sew clothing from hides.

Learn to paint, make music and sing.

They were creative, intelligent
beings whose language and song

gave new calls
to the winter night.

What ultimately drove
the mammoths to extinction

is difficult to know.

Some speculate that
the warming climate

reduced mammoth populations
dramatically,

just as humans arrived
to deal the final blow.

Roughly 4,000 years ago, while the
pyramids were being built in Egypt,

the last mammoth perished

and the species
ceased to exist.

About 12,000 years ago,
the ice began to melt.

The world's climate had shifted again,
marking the end of the pleistocene

and the dawn
of the holocene epoch.

Our modern climate era
had begun.

As the glaciers melted,

trickles became torrents

and north America was awash in
rivers and floods.

By the end
of the last ice age,

70% of the world's largest
land animals had vanished,

gone forever.

A global temperature rise
of just 16 degrees fahrenheit

was enough to change
the entire face of the planet.

Melt water drained back into the oceans,
and sea levels rose once again.

As the glaciers melted away, the
sheer power of the bulldozing ice

was revealed
in newly-created geography.

Trapped inland water
pooled to form huge lakes.

The Great Lakes.

Where cathedrals of ice
once stood,

cities of steel arose.

Humans flourished.

Our population grew from
one million during the ice age

to many billions today.

Now, our industries create
so much greenhouse gas

that we humans have become
participants in the climate equation.

As the frozen footprint of the
ice age continues to shrink,

the earth is becoming warmer
than it has been

in the last 120,000 years.

Now, as at the end
of the last ice age,

many animal species
are threatened by extinction.

Wildlife again
confronts a warming climate,

habitat loss and the pressures
of a changing world.

The ice age has left behind
cautionary reminders.

And as global warming melts the
permafrost of the far north,

occasionally, an entire
frozen mammoth is revealed.

Baby mammoth lyuba

was discovered when
her icy tomb melted away.

She astounded biologists

because of her completeness
and incredible preservation.

Ct scans reveal that all of her
internal organs are intact.

And the discovery of mud
in her throat and lungs

suggests that she died
in a shallow lake.

Lyuba was only one month old
when she died,

a sad fate for this young
mammoth, but a gift to us

that she has traveled 42,000 years
to share her ice age secrets.

We visit ice age relics
and hold them in awe,

for they connect us
to the past.

To look at lyuba
is to look back in time.

Woolly mammoths,
once titans of the ice age,

are now extinct,

while we who lived
among them, live on.

Creatures from our frozen past continue
to yield clues about their lives.

And the more we learn about their world,
the better we understand our own.

But perhaps the greatest
gift of the ice age

is neither bone nor hide.

It is our minds that
helped us survive the ice.

And only our wisdom

may guide us toward
a sustainable future.

For the ice age is a climate story
more relevant now than ever.