Gary Cole, age 11, of Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, for his question:

Did people live during the ice ages?

We now know that the earth has been plagued with ice ages through hundreds of millions of years. There was one about half a billion years ago, when life existed only in the ancient seas. Certainly there were no people around at that time. Some 200 million years ago, ice glaciers covered parts of India and Africa, Australia and South America. This was before the time of the great dinosaurs    and long before the first human families arrived.

Four of the most recent ice ages came and went during the past million years. The dinosaurs had departed and the age of mammals was well on its way. And yes, there were a few primitive human families. They could not read or write, build or even farm. But some of these remote ancestors of ours lived along the fringes of the great glaciers and knew how to cope with the bitter cruelty of an ice age.