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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 fakefuck39 on Monday January 04 2021, @08:30AM (2 children)
No I get that. But then the guy just VPNs to a different server and creates another account - in fact he can create a bunch of accounts from different servers at the same time.
My main point is it sounds like the timeout thing is not automatic. Can you imagine just 2-3 of these methheads, on like 10 servers each? If that's a manual effort - that's a lot of work for the admins and should probably be replaced by a single page of perl.
(Score: 1) by hemocyanin on Monday January 04 2021, @10:16AM (1 child)
Do people instantly get mod points? I thought there was some minimum karma that must be built up to get mod privileges.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by fakefuck39 on Monday January 04 2021, @10:36AM
From what I noticed, only when you get a bit of karma. When I had low karma shortly after creating the account, I didn't have mod points. After getting high karma I started getting bugged to moderate (so i opted out of moderation). The ACs modding probably have a normal account they use to build up karma to then mod politically. I can see that when I have a normal on-topic post that gets modded up as +4 informative, then a random single troll mod comes in. That's coming from one of these spammer's real accounts. Not exactly sure what they're trying to do, but it's a waste of time figuring out the logical train of thought of a chihuahua on adderall.