The first people knew how to make winters “bearable”.
New evidence suggests that people living in Europe nearly half a million years ago could have endured extreme cold by hibernating for months, The Guardian reported.
Fossils unearthed in an ancient mass grave in northern Spain have shown months of interrupted bone growth – similar to lesions found on the remains of hibernating mammals, such as bears in caves, the researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal L’Anthropologie .
Human bones – which date back more than 400,000 years and probably date back to Neanderthals – indicate our ancestors slowed their metabolism and slept through harsh winters “to survive freezing conditions and food shortages.” scientists.
“A hibernation strategy would have been the only solution to survive, having to spend months in a cave due to frozen conditions,” the experts wrote.
The area around the site half a million years ago would not have provided our predecessors with enough “high-fat” food to survive the winters – “making them resort to hibernation in the cave,” the newspaper said.
Ancient people probably found themselves “in metabolic conditions that helped them survive long periods of cold conditions, with limited amounts of food and sufficient deposits of body fat,” the scientists wrote.
The bones were excavated from the Sima de los Huesos cave, also known as the “bone pit” – which is one of the most important fossil sites in the world.
The remains of the hibernating cave bears were also found in the Sima pit.