the summers that never got warm enough
After the Last Glacial Maximum, solar radiation at high latitudes remains weak. The expected warming fails to materialise, and the Laurentide and Scandinavian ice sheets retain their mass.
No thaw, no Holocene
The moment when, in the actual timeline, the Holocene began comes and goes without any thawing. The ice caps remain in place, sea levels stay low, and the Bering land bridge remains passable, dry land.
steppe peoples without grain fields
Without the fertile, warm conditions of a Holocene, grain agriculture such as that in the Fertile Crescent does not emerge. For centuries, people remain hunters, fishers, and gatherers on a large scale.
The last mammoths do not survive the extinction
Despite the ongoing ice age climate, mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and cave lions still disappear, this time mainly due to human hunting pressure on a shrinking but still extensive habitat.
coastal peoples of the drained world
Human civilizations develop along the broad, exposed continental shelves rather than around flooded river plains. Trade networks follow the coastlines of a world with a much lower sea level.
Humanity as a factor in an ice age that does not end
In the present, people still live in a glacial era. Civilizations have adapted to permafrost and short growing seasons, with technology focused on warmth, storage, and survival in the cold rather than on expansion into warmer, uninhabited continents.
The persisting ice, fifty thousand years later
Where the original timeline predicts a new future ice age fifty thousand years from now, this world at that point still finds itself in the same unbroken glacial period that began at the Last Glacial Maximum.
Not claimed yet
Bedacht bij "Het Laatste Glaciale Maximum" via Wat als…? en niet opgeëist.
Humanity as a factor in an ice age that does not end
Cities have arisen on the ice-free strips along the equator and in sheltered valleys, connected by roads across frozen tundra. There is no Industrial Revolution such as arose in the warm, fertile world; energy is drawn from wood, whale oil, and early wind power to cope with the persistent cold. Scientists in this world study ice cores not to reconstruct a bygone ice age, but to understand why their own ice age still refuses to end after two hundred thousand years.