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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 04 2021, @01:23AM (3 children)
Some of the VPN servers are already banned for AC posts and such. I know, because I've logged in through some of them.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday January 04 2021, @08:27AM (2 children)
lol never change runaway.
I'm actually a full supporter of AC spam - it's fun to read, and it's nostalgic a bit from crapdot. It's like pepper on your steak. The issue is, the dude pastes pages and pages of the same thing like 50 times. Like it was funny the first time, come up with new shit.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2021, @09:56AM (1 child)
You and your friends did a lot of that on Slashdot. It was obnoxious then and it's every bit as asinine here and now. I don't actually give a shit about creimer, but when those comments were spammed 10 or 20 times in a single article in reply to numerous on-topic posts, it was far too disruptive. The problem with the spam here isn't just that the trolling is repetitive, but that it's also angry and vile.
I'm not sure I agree on the particulars of this statement, but I agree in principle that AC spam isn't necessarily bad. Much of the AC spam from old school Slashdot wasn't actually from ACs but from troll accounts with karma so low they automatically posted at -1.
For me, the distinction is something that's light-hearted and silly, perhaps dumb, versus something that's malicious and mean-spirited. A lot of the light-hearted AC spam became a part of Slashdot culture. I'm talking about Natalie Portman and hot grits, IN SOVIET RUSSIA, Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?, ALL YOUR ____ ARE BELONG TO US, *BSD is dying, the app appers guy, the cows guy, and so on. Even the IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS GUY was actually pretty damn funny. Even tricking people into clicking goatsex links eventually became a part of the culture of that site to the point that occasionally goatsex links would be modded +5 funny.
Trolls posted these comments frequently enough, once per story, but across many stories, that they because part of the culture of the community. The problem is that trolls doing the same thing here, posting these light-hearted comments in many stories, would quickly bring out the spam mod. There's no opportunity for the light-hearted trolls to be repeated often enough that they become recurring jokes.
If you want the AC spam that you fondly remember -- and I agree with you, by the way -- then the definition of the spam mod needs to change. It needs to be restricted to malicious comments like APK's spam and not to stupid light-hearted trolling. I do give APK a bit of credit for finding a way around the lameness filter to post ASCII goatsex, he just shouldn't have posted it in like 20 articles. Now, if 10 IN SOVIET RUSSIA comments show up in one article, sure, spam mod them. But as long as it's not excessive in a single article, light-hearted trolling that's repeated across different articles should be exempt from the spam mod.
I can get behind what you're suggesting provided the spam mod criteria are changed a bit.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Monday January 04 2021, @10:17AM
Every post I made on slashdot was original content. The guy literally posted many times that the reason he is on slashdot was to spam the articles and create sales on his amazon page, which he vigorously advertised. People had enough, and we used all methods at our disposal to successfully get his account banned. We removed the spammer. But none of that was by spamming ourselves, or pasting the same crap over and over the comments.
We attacked the spammer, not the readers. What's going on here is the opposite.
Let's say this spammer AC wants to attack me. Flooding the articles with repetitive copypasta does zezo to me, I literally don't care. I read it the first time, laugh, then I have to click collapse when I see it again - like everyone else who reads at -1. This is an annoyance to everyone - albeit a minor one.
the lameness filter sucks though - ASCII goatsex is funny, there's no reason to filter it. It adds humor and flavor to the discussion. It's the repetitive shit that needs to go.
Maybe the real simple solution is just to not allow posts that are completely identical? It's an easy grep filter, and this will at least make the spammer have to spend more time to modify each post? That's a low hanging fruit if I ever saw one.