Airdate: Ice Age Giants

ABC1 begins a new 3-part series, Ice Age Giants, exploring the lives and deaths of the creatures that inhabited the planet during the Ice Age.

Step back in time by just 20,000 years and the world is a very different place. Vast swathes of the northern hemisphere are covered by ice sheets, glaciers carve great valleys through the landscape and continents merge as sea levels fall.

Immense hairy beasts and ferocious predators rule, while spectacular animals migrate across vast, unfamiliar landscapes. Alongside them, as both prey and predator, humans face their own challenges as they struggle to survive.

With unique access to spectacular excavations and state of the art forensic analysis, Ice Age Giants travels back to a land before time, unearthing ancient pieces of an elaborate jigsaw to reveal the Ice Age through the eyes of the animals that lived there.

Join Professor Alice Roberts as she journeys 40,000 years back in time on the trail of the great beasts of the Ice Age. This was the last time that giants like mammoths, woolly rhinos, and sabre-tooth cats ruled our planet. Drawing on the latest scientific detective work, and a dash of graphic wizardry, Alice brings the Ice Age giants back to life.

Alice’s Ice Age odyssey begins in the land of the Sabre-tooth – North America, a continent that was half covered by ice, up to two miles thick. Yet, it also boasts the most impressive cast of Ice Age giants in the world – the Shasta ground sloth, Glyptodont, and the Columbian mammoth.

These leviathans all have one thing in common: they are stalked by the meanest big cat to ever prowl the Earth. Armed with 7-inch teeth and hunting in packs, beware of Smilodon fatalis, the sabre-tooth cat.

7:30pm Sunday March 23 ABC1.