Review of Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age — Praise and Pitfalls [Spoilers]

Apple TV has just released Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age, the third season of the franchise (Link). This time the series jumps tens of millions of years forward—from the Mesozoic landscapes of the first two seasons to (as the name implies) the much more frigid and turbulent world of the Pleistocene. I write and read way too much about that period of Earth’s history and have watched the previous seasons, so I was obviously excited for it. Overall, I certainly enjoyed Ice Age with all it had to offer. However, I would be lying if I said I didn’t have any complaints.

The previous seasons focused mainly on dinosaurs and earned widespread praise for their meticulous detail and stunning visuals. Narration by the legendary Sir David Attenborough solidified this excellence, so when I learned he wouldn’t be narrating this season, I was kind of let down. That said, Tom Hiddleston does an admirable job, and the season absolutely makes up for the change in voice with some of the best Ice Age animal portrayals I’ve ever seen on screen. Creatures rarely or never shown in prehistoric documentaries—Homotherium, Gigantopithecus, Stegodon, Elasmotherium—finally get their moment in the spotlight.

After binge-watching all the episodes, I’ve finally completed my breakdown. I will provide an overview of the episodes, express what I thought the show did well, and then a dive into the criticisms I have—first general and then scientific, with a special focus on paleoecology and paleoclimatology.

Warning, there are major spoilers ahead, so if you don’t want to know what happens, please do not continue reading!

Episode Overview

Season 3 contains five episodes just like the previous seasons. Across these episodes, we see diverse Ice Age animals coping with the constant stresses of everyday life in the wild as well as environmental changes. Animals from all across the Earth, inhabiting a variety of habitats, are shown in exquisite detail—a reminder that the Pleistocene world wasn’t just a single snowy wasteland but a tapestry of grasslands, forests, deserts, coastlines, and much more.

Episode 1 — The Big Freeze

The season opens strong: a woolly mammoth mother giving birth in the midst of a blizzard and miraculously surviving along with her newborn calf, cave bears driving off cave lions, and a young Smilodon populator unsuccessfully attempting to bring down a Macrauchenia. It sets the tone for the series—these were often harsh and cold environments quite different from those of the warmer worlds of preceding epochs but also vibrant, diverse ecosystems filled with life.

Episode 2 — New Lands

Here the focus shifts to biogeography. With the Isthmus of Panama formed and sea levels lower, animals pour into new territories: Arctotherium (the largest bear ever) in South America after its ancestors migrated from North America, glyptodonts moving in the opposite direction, and dwarf Stegodon stranded on islands as sea levels rise. It’s a solid showcase of how plate tectonics and ice sheets allowed animals to colonize new territories and mingle with new creatures.

Episode 3 — Desert Lands

Animals battle desert conditions from Australia to North America—Procoptodon, Thylacoleo, rock-climbing sloths, and more. Extinct Australian megafauna are often excluded from paleo-documentaries and shows, so it is a welcome sight to see them. I will unpack this much more soon, but this also happens to be the episode where the season’s science seriously falters.

Episode 4 — Grass Lands

Expanded ice age grasslands supported large and vibrant herds of herbivores. Elasmotherium, a highly diverged lineage of rhinoceros that gets much less attention in paleo-media than the contemporaneous woolly rhino. Gigantopithecus, an orangutan relative that has (to my knowledge) not been shown in previous documentaries, is also featured in the form of a lone male struggling to survive in a shrinking forest. The episode reveals that the expansion of grasslands was a blessing for some animals, such as Elasmotherium and woolly mammoths, but a monumental challenge for those that preferred forest, such as the Gigantopithecus.

Episode 5 — The Big Melt

As the Ice Age ends, the show depicts species facing warming climates, rising seas, and changing landscapes. Dramatic scenes include Homotherium hunting mammoths, Arctodus simus testing its luck against a Steller’s sea cow, and hyenas pursuing Megaloceros. It’s a gripping finale—but scientifically problematic in places.

What the Season Does Right

Let’s start with what I thought was great about the series. My expectations of the season were shaped partly by the trailers and partly by an early review by AnimalOrigins. When I was watching the trailers, I felt that the animals’ movements did not seem natural, as though they weren’t large, hulking animals but instead more like inflated replicas of those animals. However, having watched them in the show itself, I can happily say that the animals as well as their movements seemed much more convincing than I was expecting.

The animals themselves all look incredible. Especially majestic-looking in my opinion are Arctotherium, the male Smilodon populator in episode 2, Elasmotherium, Gigantopithecus (which looks kind of like a cross between a gorilla and an orangutan), Megaloceros, and Homotherium. Moreover, the animals are all shown in vibrant and stunning scenery which only accentuates the visual appeal of the show. I enjoyed the sight of ground sloths in the snow-covered coniferous forest.

I appreciated that the woolly rhinos in the first episode are shown grazing in an open woodland, which is important in my opinion because these (along with other mammoth steppe fauna) are too often depicted in paleoart as being solely restricted to grasslands. I do not know if it was a deliberate decision on the part of the creators, but putting them in wooded environments is a good way of displaying the complex and varied habitats that these animals found themselves in. 

The blend of still-extant species with extinct ones reinforces that these prehistoric worlds were not alien. These animals lived in ecosystems filled with extant animals and plants we still see today. The show does a great job humanizing the animals without anthropomorphizing them.

Overall, there were a lot of great things in the new season. However, there are a number of criticisms I have—some of which are major. I will start with the general ones first, before moving on to the scientific side of things.

General Criticism

After having watched the early review of the season by AnimalOrigins, I was a bit surprised at some of the flaws the creator pointed out. I was hoping that these would not be as noticeable in the show itself but unfortunately, they were. This doesn’t make them deal-breakers for me, but it is slightly disappointing as these would have been so easy to fix. 

One point made in the aforementioned review was that the series is too vague in describing the animals and only sparingly uses scientific names. For example, I do not recall glyptodonts ever being referred to as such but rather only as “giant armadillos”. Elasmotherium was not directly named in the episode proper but only in the Under the Ice segment, which is very unfortunate because it is rare that this enigmatic creature is depicted on screen. Also, given the large variety of sabre-toothed cats present in the world during the Pleistocene, the show should have been more explicit in naming them to avoid confusion.

Another issue that was brought up in the early review was the sheer ambiguity of locations. Landmasses are rarely named and for someone not well-versed in paleontology, it would be very difficult to know in real time where a given scene is taking place. I was able to surmise that the scene with the cave bears, cave hyenas, and cave lions in the first episode most likely took place in Europe, but even I struggled a few times during various episodes to figure out which part of the world I was seeing. Also, as the AnimalOrigins review points out, the show cuts directly from cave bears in Europe to ground sloths in North America without stating that they were in different locations, which can make a layman believe that these animals lived alongside each other when they didn’t. This was a recurring problem.

Vague terms such as “far north” are used but there is no way of knowing where in the far north, which is obviously vast. Was it Siberia? Alaska? The Yukon? In one case, the use of the term “far north” is not especially apt to begin with; it was used to describe the home of the cave bears in the first episode, but neither cave bears nor cave hyenas (also depicted at the site) are known to have lived beyond the mid-latitudes. 

If I were part of the development team for the show, I would have explicitly named the locations along with the colloquial and scientific names of the taxa, with brief on-screen text showing this information. That would cut down a lot of confusion and appear far more professional.

All in all, I get the sense that the creators couldn’t decide whether this season should be a science-heavy documentary or a wildlife-drama series with broad appeal. Rather than smoothly following a middle path, it seems to be inconsistent. Sometimes the show is richly informative; other times it’s vague to the point of confusion. 

Still, these are not massive issues and I would be willing to look past them. Criticisms of the science itself are another story, however.

Scientific Criticism

Now things get more serious. The season seemed mostly reasonable from the standpoint of scientific accuracy, but there are major flaws. I will focus more on the palaeoecological/paleoclimatic side of things, with references for my rebuttals to the show’s claims included at the end of this article.

Exaggerated and outdated “ultra-arid ice age” tropes

The first order of business is the mishandling of paleoclimatology, and more specifically ice age hydrology (as it relates to the distribution of water on Earth). Desert Lands was especially bad in this regard. As someone who writes extensively on Late Quaternary environments, this episode was admittedly… difficult to watch.

The show ignores the wealth of information we’ve gained from up-to-date paleoclimatic research, which indicates a deep level of intricacy to Pleistocene climate swings, in favor of simplistic and amateurish statements about glacial periods that are unsupported by actual evidence. These include:

• Deserts expanding to “five times larger than today”

• Australia drying out catastrophically because of glacial conditions

• Global aridification being linked directly to massive Northern Hemisphere ice sheets “pulling moisture inward”

The main gist of Desert Lands is that extensive ice sheets in the colder parts of the world left much less water for regions down south, such as Australia or South America, causing the massive expansion of deserts there. They claim that this led to a wide swathe of extinctions, especially in Australia. At one point, they even show a Moa, an extinct flightless bird native to New Zealand, needing to cross through desert to reach suitable habitat. This is New Zealand…a place known for being mostly humid and which has not harbored true deserts during glacials (although scrublands and grasslands certainly did expand at times).

The misinformation presented here is unfortunate because there were actual Earth scientists involved in consultation for the production. Without trying to sound too harsh, I must urge anyone reading this to not take the claims in this episode very seriously, because they’re just wrong. There’s a lot to correct so we will need to get into the nitty-gritty of paleoclimatology for a minute (I also have a lengthier article on Last Glacial Maximum aridity which goes into some detail on the same topics if anyone is interested in more information). The following is what the science actually shows and how it conflicts with the show’s narrative:

1. Glacials were not uniformly dry across the world. The show uses the term “ice age” as a stand-in for glacial period. Glacials were highly variable climatically from both geographical or temporal standpoints (considering that since the mid-Pleistocene, they lasted around 100,000 years each). It is true that precipitation fell across much of the world, but this was at least partly balanced out by evaporation over land decreasing as well. The ratio of precipitation to evaporation, rather than precipitation alone, is what determines the moisture budget (what really matters for plants and animals). Even during the peak of the last ice age, the Last Glacial Maximum, some areas would have been drier while others were wetter, and others were largely the same.

2. Moisture sources for the tropics and the high latitudes are not the same. Large parts of the world experience monsoonal-driven precipitation, and monsoons do not simply “shut down” because North America and Europe have large ice sheets. In fact, speleothem and lake-level data indicates that relatively wet periods in the tropics and subtropics occurred cyclically throughout glacial periods regardless of the size of the ice sheets, especially in the southern hemisphere. Monsoons were responding primarily to precession/eccentricity-driven changes in summer insolation as well as millennial scale cooling events such as Heinrich stadials, with monsoons in the northern and southern hemispheres strengthening at opposite times.

3. Much of the apparent glacial “dryness” can be attributed to other forces. The aridity that has been inferred from paleovegetation records is suggested to have been the result of low CO₂-mediated vegetation decline, not desertification. Trees in particular suffer from the effects of low CO₂. Additionally, stronger winds rather than aridity alone promoted dust transport and a dustier atmosphere.

4. It is not firmly established what accounts for the difference in wetness between the “ice ages” and prior, warmer periods. While it is undeniably true that periods like the Pliocene were wetter than both the Pleistocene and Holocene, it is not entirely clear what factors account for all of this (ice sheet and CO₂ differences cannot fully explain it). There are theories that cloud properties were different during the Pliocene, resulting in differences in sea temperatures and atmospheric circulation. Some speculate that the aridification of Australia was partly driven by the emergence of the east Indonesian islands. 

The bottom line is that paleoclimatology is immensely more complex than the image that the creators have promoted. The extreme exaggeration of aridity, as well as chalking said aridity up to “massive ice sheets sucking water out of the atmosphere” may be somewhat excusable if the creators wanted to dramatize and simplify ice age hydrology, but it is ultimately a misrepresentation of climate science. I would say that it is way past time for scientists and science-communicators to move beyond this outdated trope.

The Megaloceros (and the Cave Hyenas)

The final episode, The Big Melt, features a captivating story where a giant deer, the Megaloceros, is struggling to survive in a warming world as wet conditions cause the proliferation of woodlands. The giant deer is later chased down by cave hyenas and narrowly escapes by breaking its antlers off after getting them stuck in a tree. The “Big Melt” being discussed is the most recent glacial-interglacial transition.

Right off the bat, there is a glaring issue: the setting is clearly somewhere in the terminal Pleistocene, perhaps the Bølling-Allerød interstadial, but reliable data indicates that cave hyenas had already gone extinct thousands of years prior to this (somewhere between 30 and 20 thousand years ago). As such, a clan of hyenas hunting a Megaloceros at this time would not make sense.

The narration claims that the animal was struggling due to encroachment of trees. Megaloceros did prefer parkland-type environments over closed forests but the animal is known to have been widespread and thriving during previous interglacials. In fact, it made it several thousand years into the Holocene as well, very odd for a creature that supposedly does not do well in “warm and wet” interglacial climates.

What could be the difference between this interglacial and previous ones? Well, humans, of course. They would have actively hunted the deer but also could have indirectly induced forest closure via driving large herbivores to extinction-it is known that the previous interglacial in Europe was more open and more lightly-wooded compared to the present one because large temperate megafauna were present. Yet, the extinction of this animal is implied to be a mainly climate-driven process. This leads me to the next scientific criticism.

Extinction Narratives: A Familiar Problem

 I have written extensively about the Late Quaternary Extinctions (which included Late Pleistocene and many Holocene extinctions) and published a three-part series on the topic less than a month ago. As such, I was hoping that the series would remain ambiguous with regard to the extinction causes of the animals so that I would not have to breach the topic again-at least for a while. Unfortunately, the approach that the show decided to take has put me in a position where I must address it for this review.

Both Desert Lands and The Big Melt put heavy emphasis on climatic pressures as contributing to extinction, with the former episode arguing that “ice age” aridification was a driver of extinctions in places like Australia and the latter arguing that a warming climate was essential to extinctions at the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary. Neither of these notions are true but this review is already long and I do not want to spend time debunking these narratives here, as one can take a look at my older posts (links below) which contain all the information anyone will need.

Death Down Under: A Deep Look At Australia’s Megafaunal Mystery
American Extinction Part 1: Climate Conundrum
Settling the Extinction Debate Part 1: Introduction and Climate Context
Settling the Extinction Debate Part 2: Biogeography and the Human Onslaught

However, I do want to point out that this is yet another example of how bad science and biases can distort the public’s perception of the topic. The final message that the show went with was that extinctions were the result of “both human and climate factors”. But humans were only given an extremely brief mention at the end while climate change was constantly alluded to throughout the season, which will naturally make any uninformed watcher assume that climate was by far the more important element when the reality is precisely the opposite.

Verdict and Main Takeaways

In the end, I’d give Season 3 about a 7/10. There’s a lot to admire—the cinematics, the world-building, and especially the inclusion of more obscure taxa. With more generous use of scientific names, clarity in identifying geographic locations, and a more accurate portrayal of paleoenvironmental dynamics, it could have approached a 9/10.

The show’s tendency to downplay the human role in Late Quaternary extinctions was unfortunate but predictable, and therefore had minimal effect on my rating. It’s a pervasive trend in modern prehistoric media. Still, acknowledging the actual magnitude of human impacts would have elevated the season’s appeal to the point where I’d probably give it a perfect 10/10. Either that, or going down the route of simply focusing on the lives of the animals without touching the question of their demise.

Nevertheless, this was an enjoyable and visually impressive season. I appreciate the work that went into bringing these ecosystems to life, and I’d welcome future ice-age-themed seasons, or other franchises taking inspiration—ideally with more scientific clarity alongside the stunning visuals.

References