Three hundred million years of erosion have erased the fossils that could have told us what dinosaurs roamed Southwest Missouri. What a disappointment!

However, what if I told you that almost every county in Missouri has yielded fossils of a mastodon, mammoth or some other Ice Age mammal? Well, it’s true! The reason these fossils exist and dinosaur fossils don’t is because Ice Age animals lived in our much more recent past, say, 1.75 million years ago!

Geologically speaking, there just hasn’t been enough time for nature to erode the evidence of these animals.

Ice Age fossils, however, aren’t old enough to have become mineralized or petrified. So, when we talk about Ice Age fossils we’re actually talking about the preserved remains of the animals that lived during the Pleistocene period during the Cenozoic Era. It’s called the Ice Age because of a huge glacier that extended from the Arctic Circle to just north of the Missouri River.

Read on for the details of life in the Ice Age!

Plant Life

It’s hard to tell what plants existed during the Ice Age since, like animal remains, there are few fossilized clues. Today, scientists called paleobotanists depend on microscopic pollen remains found in archeological digs to give them clues. However, we know many of the types of plants we see today would have been established during the Pleistocene.

Climate

Average temperatures remained about the same during the Ice Age as they are today, although there weren’t the temperature extremes throughout the year that we see today.

Animal Life

Many of the animals you see today were also Ice Age inhabitants, although they were somewhat larger that their modern counterparts.

Pleistocene deer, raccoon, elk and fox remains have all been discovered throughout Missouri. Horses roamed the Missouri plains during the Ice Age but eventually became extinct in the New World. They were reintroduced thousands of years later by Spanish Explorers.

Camels originated in North America during the Pleistocene. Their two descendants, modern camels in the Middle East and llamas in South America, found their way to their current homes by using the same land bridges that early man used to populate the Americas.

Large dire wolves and the Giant Short-Faced Red Bear, large ancestors of the modern version, hunted the smaller game of the period.

Although dinosaurs had been gone for more than 68 million years, giants still roamed the Earth during the Ice Age. No other animal evokes visions of this period as well as the mammoths and mastodons.

The grandfathers of modern elephants, mammoths roamed the land in large herds and fed off of grasses. Mastodons, the smaller of the two species, had high-crowned teeth enabling it to eat woody shrubs and branches.

Modern man arrives on the scene

As the Ice Age concluded, one of my favorite mammals came onto the scene. Homosapiens, or modern man, crossed over from Asia on a bridge of land that connected Siberia to Alaska.

These people were called hunters and gatherers because they followed game for meat and gathered any edible plants they found along the way. Archeological evidence, including stone weapons unearthed near the Pomme de Terre River, shows that early man most likely hunted mammoths in Missouri and may have played a role in the animal’s extinction.

During this time, early man also had to cope with huge seasonal floods and blinding dust storms due to the melting of the glaciers in the north,

Around 10,000 years ago, the first big change happened in the life of early man.

The big game of the past had become scarce, forcing them to rely on smaller animals as their primary source of meat. Additionally, seeds and roots became a more important part of their diet. As time progressed, they gave up following game in favor of permanent camps sustained by extended hunting trips.

Eventually, the camps became villages with gardens providing a significant amount of food. Major inventions such as pottery and weaving revolutionized the way food was stored and cooked and
what styles of clothes were worn.

Although most tools of this period were used for hunting purposes, artifacts such as axes, adzes and drills revealed a gathering shift in lifestyle. This was the beginning of civilization in North America.

But remember, students, while it took only a couple of paragraphs to discuss these changes, it took early man more than 8,000 years to accomplish it!

Civilization develops in Missouri

In 900 A.D., a new civilization formed in Missouri at the intersection of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Referred to as Cahokia-
St. Louis, this metropolis spread its culture to other outposts. Steed-Kisker at Kansas City, Spiro-Mound in Arkansas and Aztalan in Wisconsin were all tied to Cahokia.

For the first time, the inhabitants of Missouri were more dependent on gardening than any other activity. They grew corn, beans and squash as their staple foods. Since the culture was considered Riverine in type, it relied heavily on rivers as a source of fish and as a means to travel and transport trade items. City dwellers manufactured pottery for trade that was carried for hundreds of miles to barter.

Today, it remains a mystery how a culture that had such a far-reaching impact could vanish as quickly as it came. By the time European settlers reached this far inland, there was no trace of the once thriving culture of Cahokia, and the tribes they encountered are those you read about in your history books!