The Landscape 11,000 Years Ago Dominated by forests of spruce and pine, the territory our ancestors inhabited 11,000 years ago looked very different from Mashantucket today. The climate was warmer than it had been during the time of the glacier, but winters here were still severely cold.  There were many black spruce trees, which thrive only in cool regions, as well as birch and jack pine, which took hold as a result of the warming trend.  How did this climate and landscape affect the people who lived in and around what is now southern New England? Re-creating a Past Environment The landscape of Connecticut 11,000 years ago is depicted as accurately as possible in the museum’s Caribou Kill Diorama -- the centerpiece of the Life in a Cold Climate gallery.  Exhibit designer Mike Hanke and his team traveled to northern Maine to study and photograph a landscape that paleobotanists say is similar to the ancient environment of southern New England.  The site they visited, a leather leaf bog filled with black spruce, and a terrain covered with sedge, was the reference for the detailed reconstructions you can see in this life-sized diorama. The open woodland environment of this region was certainly more hospitable than the rocky, nearly barren landscape left by the receding glacier a few thousand years earlier.  But these were not easy times for people who depended on woodland resources.  Forests of spruce and pine offer relatively little food for people and do not support a great diversity of animals.  Nor was the landscape uniform.  Instead, it was more like a mosaic, with some areas relatively rich in resources and others poor. There were, however, seasonally-abundant sources of food, and the key to survival at this time was knowing where and when to find them.  People had to know the movements of the caribou, where to find edible species of plants, and during which weeks of the year the fish would run.  And because the landscape was patchy, with resources widely dispersed, people had to be willing to travel in order to survive. As a result, our ancestors knew the hills, streams, swamps, and waterfalls of the region far better than most of us do today.  People remained on the move throughout much of the year, following the herds of large game animals and revisiting the places where they had found other sources of food in years and seasons past.  This way of life made the best use of the resources at hand, and it was probably the typical way of life for people in this region for the next several thousand years.