Ice Age Australia

The Ancients

History Hit

History

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 February 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Giant kangaroos. Killer wombats. Carnivorous lions. These beasts once roamed the barren landscape of Ice Age Australia - a vast supercontinent stretching from Papua New Guinea to Tasmania.

Continuing our Ice Age miniseries, host of The Ancients Tristan Hughes heads down under to uncover this lost world. Joined by palaeontologist Prof. Larisa DeSantis, he explores how these creatures survived both the challenges of a harsh climate and the arrival of humans 60,000 years ago, and discovers why Australia’s mammalian giants ultimately vanished.

Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.

All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds

The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.

Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.

You can take part in our listener survey here:

https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit.
0:08.1	With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabatans, and enjoy a new release every week.
0:19.3	Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe.
0:42.8	The woolly mammoth, the saber-toothed tiger, the giant ground sloth.
0:47.7	When someone mentions the Ice Age, you might immediately think of great beasts like these,
0:53.1	these large animals that roamed the Pleistocene landscape and are today extinct.
0:57.1	But what about the Procopterodon Goliah, a giant short-faced kangaroo, or the deprotodon, a giant carnivorous marsupial, also known as the killer
1:04.7	wombat? Or perhaps the Wanambi, a huge species of snake similar to modern-day pythons.
1:12.0	These frightening, lesser-known megafauna that lived on the supercontinent that was Ice Age Australia.
1:19.0	It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.
1:24.3	Today we're exploring the extraordinary world of Ice Age Australia.
1:27.8	We'll explore the climate, the many different individual beasts that once roamed the land,
1:32.3	the arrival of humans around 60,000 years ago, and why many of these megafauna ultimately went extinct.
1:39.3	Our guest today is Professor Larissa Desantis from Vanderbilt University. Larissa is a paleontologist who has been studying the megafauna of Ice Age Australia,
1:49.0	looking at the fossil record, including those from a remarkable site in New South Wales called Cuddy Springs.
1:55.0	Larissa has examined how climate change may well have contributed to the extinction of these giant kangaroos,
2:00.0	killer wombats, flightless birds, and so on. She's here to give us an introduction to the amazing
2:05.8	world of Ice Age Australia and why its story deserves to be better known.
2:15.6	Larissa, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
2:19.0	Thanks so much for having me.
2:20.7	What an intriguing topic.
2:23.4	Ice Age Australia, when I first think of the Ice Age, I will think of Europe or North America of woolly mammoths.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -51 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Hit, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of History Hit and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.