Homo sapiens today look very different from our evolutionary origins, the microbes wriggling about in the primordial mud. But our emergence as a distinct species cannot, based on the current evidence, be conclusively traced to a single location at
Fossil Experts: Early People Hibernated to Survive Harsh Winters europesun.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from europesun.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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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.
Evidence from bones found at one of the world’s most important fossil sites suggests that our hominid predecessors may have dealt with extreme cold hundreds of thousands of years ago by sleeping through the winter.
The scientists 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.
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Scientists believe early human beings may have hibernated during winter, after finding signs of the practice in a Spanish cave,the Guardian reports.
A paper published in the journal
L’Anthropologie by Juan-Luis Arsuaga and Antonis Bartsiokas from Democritus University of Trace in Greece, says fossils from the site known as Sima de los Huesos Sima show seasonal variations which suggests that the bone growth of these early individuals was disrupted for several months of each year.
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