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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, @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.