Early humans knew how to make winters “bearable.”
New evidence suggests that humans living in Europe nearly half a million years ago may have dealt with the extreme cold wintering for months, The Guardian reported.
Fossils excavated in an ancient mass grave in northern Spain showed months of disrupted bone growth, similar to injuries found in the remains of hibernating mammals, such as cave bears, the researchers wrote in a published paper in the magazine “L’Anthropologie”.
Human bones, dating back more than 400,000 years and probably from early Neanderthals, indicate that our ancestors slowed their metabolism and slept during the harsh winters “to survive the cold conditions and the scarcity of ‘food,’ the scientists said.
“A hibernation strategy would have been the only solution to survive having to spend months in a cave due to icy conditions,” the experts wrote.
The area around the site half a million years ago would not have provided our predecessors with enough “fat-rich” food to survive the winters, “making them resort to hibernation in caves,” the newspaper says.
Ancient humans probably found themselves “in metabolic states that helped them survive for long periods of time in refrigerated conditions with limited supplies of food and sufficient reserves of body fat,” the scientists wrote.
The bones were excavated in the Sima de los Huesos cave, also known as “the bone pit”, which is one of the most important fossil sites in the world.
Remains of wintering cave bears were also found in the Sima pit.