Wife continues to make memories inspired by travels with incurably ill husband in lockdown dailymail.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailymail.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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.
Exposed to the harshest conditions imaginable on the unforgiving Iberian tundra, desperate early humans may have had no choice but to retreat into caves and hibernate. In this dark and cold environment, they may have lapsed into “metabolic states that helped them survive for long periods of time in frigid conditions with limited supplies of food and enough stores of body fat,” Arguaga and Bartsiokas explained.
The researchers acknowledge that their speculative hypothesis sounds like “science fiction.” But they note that primitive primates, from which we all evolved directly or in parallel, are among the animals known to have hibernated. This suggests that “the genetic basis and physiology for such a hypometabolism could be preserved in many mammalian species, including humans.”
pexels.com
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.