You do not know what it was like. What you now know of as central Europe was cold as cold could be. My people lived there. We were Neanderthals. Most moderns think that we were stupid. We were not.
Nor did we look “odd” to you. The skeletons that you moderns found were from our elders, and after three or four hundreds of years, of course they look primitive. I assure you that they were not. They were our elders that passed on the genetic trait of longevity that I have.