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Bears do it. Bats do it. Even European hedgehogs do it. And now it turns out that early human beings may also have been at it. They hibernated, according to fossil experts.
[...] [S]cientists argue that lesions and other signs of damage in fossilised bones of early humans are the same as those left in the bones of other animals that hibernate. These suggest that our predecessors coped with the ferocious winters at that time by slowing down their metabolisms and sleeping for months.
[...] In a paper published in the journal L'Anthropologie, Juan-Luis Arsuaga – who led the team that first excavated at the site – and Antonis Bartsiokas, of Democritus University of Thrace in Greece, [suggest that] these early humans found themselves "in metabolic states that helped them to survive for long periods of time in frigid conditions with limited supplies of food and enough stores of body fat".
[...] The researchers admit the notion "may sound like science fiction" but point out that many mammals including primates such as bushbabies and lemurs do this. "This suggests that the genetic basis and physiology for such a hypometabolism could be preserved in many mammalian species including humans," state Arsuaga and Bartsiokas.
The pattern of lesions found in the human bones at the Sima cave are consistent with lesions found in bones of hibernating mammals, including cave bears. "A strategy of hibernation would have been the only solution for them to survive having to spend months in a cave due to the frigid conditions," the authors state.
Journal Reference:
Antonis Bartsiokas, Juan-Luis Arsuaga, Hibernation in hominins from Atapuerca, Spain half a million years ago, L'Anthropologie (DOI: 10.1016/j.anthro.2020.102797)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Sunday January 03 2021, @08:41PM (1 child)
I buy that humans in primitive settings would sleep a lot and do very little to conserve heat and calories. Watch those survival shows where participants compete to stay out in the wilderness the longest, and the ones that have trouble securing a reliable food supply and shelter hunker down and stop moving for days. There have also been cases where people are injured and trapped in remote places and their bodies slow to a flicker of activity to try to survive.
It seems a step too far, though, to say that humans used to actually hibernate the way bears do.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2021, @04:43PM
Yeah many of the aborigines could do the low temp thing: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/jappl.1958.13.2.211 [physiology.org]