[knarf]

“The idol was carved during an era of great climate change, when early forests were spreading across a warmer late glacial to postglacial Eurasia,” Terberger tells Franz Lidz of the New York Times. “The landscape changed, and the art—figurative designs and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock—did, too, perhaps as a way to help people come to grips with the challenging environments they encountered.”

Did I misunderstand ?

[Alas Babylon!]

You said:

A longer, more fruitful growing season was "challenging" ?

These people weren't growers.

My reply was directed to the fact that they were hunters, not growers. In fact, the people of the Eurasian steppes were known as the "mammoth hunters". The mammoth and other vast herds died out--from that huge area--when the trees came back.

There IS game in the forest, but not in the huge herds found in grasslands.

A few thousand miles to the south, people were indeed learning to grow stuff and tame animals--but not the Russian steppe people. Not for a few more thousand years.