(ORDO NEWS) — We are all waiting for spring. And it’s not about romance. Man is a tropical creature. Even if he is a Siberian in the fifth generation.
We are talking about more distant ancestors – those that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. Where did they live? That’s right, in Africa, the first people appeared on the hot continent.
Why at some point did they decide to settle where there is frost and snowdrifts? Scientists don’t have an answer yet. But they are sure that winter has played a huge role in human evolution.
Tropical Man
From the point of view of biologists, a person is a tropical species, – Laura Book, an evolutionary anthropologist and geneticist Kyoko Yamaguchi from John Moores University in Liverpool (UK), assures.
For most of our evolutionary history, we lived in warm climates. And there is nothing surprising in the fact that in winter we want to crawl under the covers and wait for the summer.
But we’re still doing great! We have houses (and primitive people have caves at best), batteries and stoves (and not a fire that must be constantly maintained), down jackets and thermal underwear (instead of skins).
But imagine that you are the first of the people who were brought far to the north. Well, you need to figure out what to wrap yourself in at night, so as not to die. How to run to the mammoth without getting bogged down in a snowdrift. How to warm your hands, how to drink water that suddenly turned into ice.
Whether you like it or not, you will start to evolve! Invent new tools, invent clothes and generally develop the brain. Other parts of the body, by the way, too.
A million years of frost
The ancient inhabitants of Europe first saw winter almost a million years ago – more precisely, 900 thousand years. It was in Haysborough – England, in the county of Norfolk, on the North Sea.
There are found the most ancient traces of hominins (as all people are called, both modern and extinct primitive species, such as Australopithecus and Neanderthals) in such northern latitudes.
True, the comrades did not stay there for a long time. Either they didn’t survive, or they didn’t like it – and moved south.
Traces of them both appeared and disappeared. Scientists did not find caves and traces of fire – which makes these first northerners completely mysterious.
Perhaps the hominids from Haysborough only came here in the summer. Do animals have seasonal migrations, maybe people followed them? But where and how?
According to another version, they moved to England during the warm era along the isthmus that connected the island with continental Europe.
And when the climate began to change and the winters became harsh, they went back.
Hands, Legs, Brain
And the Neanderthals generally got the ice age! Primitive polar explorers, one might say. This species appeared in Europe 400 thousand years ago.
And what is interesting – and compared to more ancient people from Africa, and compared to us, the Neanderthals had short and strong arms and legs, a wide and muscular torso.
All in order to keep warm, anthropologists explain. Curious how evolution will go in the era of global warming? Hands stretched to the knees, everyone’s legs will become like top models?
And Neanderthals also insulated caves with skins, walked in furs and skillfully handled fire. Warmed up and cooked hot food. What could be better than coming from the cold to a warm hearth!
Fire is a separate issue. The famous British anthropologist Richard Wrangham wrote the book Light the Fire. How cooking made us human.
The idea is this: as soon as people learned to cook food on fire, it became much easier for the body to digest it. And the released energy went to the development of the brain.
Roughly speaking, the intestines of our distant ancestors became smaller, and the brain became larger and smarter.
And it played a decisive role in evolution. And campfire gatherings helped create more complex social bonds. Well, warm up, of course.
The oldest evidence for the use of fire is 1.7 million years ago! – found in Georgia and northern China, recalls Wil Robrocks, an archaeologist from Leiden University (Netherlands). Not the Arctic, of course, but snow and sub-zero temperatures in winter are not uncommon there.
Cultural Code
Homo sapiens, that is, our ancestors, are newcomers to wintering. The ancient people of our species appeared 300 thousand years ago.
In Africa. And they came to other continents only 60 thousand years ago. And since then we’ve been adjusting to winter.
For example, light skin appeared in Homo sapiens – it helps to better synthesize vitamin D when there is not enough sun. Long winter evenings.
Those who have climbed very far to the north, like the Inuit in Greenland, have a genetically changed metabolism – the body is ready for a diet of fatty fish, which is high in calories and the same vitamin D.
Biological adaptation is slower in humans than in monkeys, for example. But we are able to adapt to changes not only physiologically, but also culturally: change behavior and lifestyle.
As a result, people live in all corners of the Earth and feel great in any climate, according to Buk and Yamaguchi.
The first fur coats from Siberia!
Why, without frost, we wouldn’t even have clothes!
The invention of needles, which made it possible to sew comfortable fur coats from shapeless skins, is one of the most important innovations, thanks to which primitive people settled vast territories with a cold climate.
This is the conclusion of researchers from the University of Bordeaux in France and the Institute of Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Where was the needle invented? Primitive geniuses, to whom the entire fashion industry should be grateful, lived in Denisova Cave in the Altai Territory and in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region of China.
And, it seems, independently of each other, three made the first stone needles with an eye. It was 45 – 40 thousand years ago. That’s what Siberian winters are capable of!
By the way
And they forgot how to hibernate
People hibernated in winter – like bears! If evolution had gone a slightly different way, we would not have bought champagne and tangerines in December, but new blankets.
Climb into bed and set an alarm for March 1st. It seems that our distant ancestors did just that. For some reason, we have not inherited this habit (at the end of winter it seems that in vain).
A surprising hypothesis was put forward by paleonthropologists Juan Luis Arsuaga of the Complutense University in Spain and Antonis Bartsiokas of the University of Thrace in Greece.
They studied the remains of primitive people from the Sima de los Huesos cave in Spain. They are 430 thousand years old.
And they found changes very similar to those that occur in the body of hibernating animals: bears, badgers, raccoons. As well as sores associated with a deficiency of vitamin D and minerals.
“We saw that the bones grew inconsistently: there were periods when growth slowed down, and they repeated periodically, as if in seasons,” Arsuaga says.
Where does the deficiency of vitamins and minerals come from? And also seasonal? And so strong that it affected the whole body? People did not see the sunlight and did not eat!
Quietly snoozing in winter hibernation. Well, it would be nice to sleep in the Denisova Cave! How cold is it in Spain? This is the peak of the Ice Age. Then in the south of Europe in the winter it was not sweet.
And why don’t the peoples of the Arctic have a habit of sleeping through the winter? Perhaps the answer is diet, suggest Arsuaga and Bartsiokas.
Northerners eat a lot of oily fish and venison – they get enough nutrients for the normal functioning of the body.
The Iberian Peninsula half a million years ago was not fertile, the climate was extremely dry, and the ancient inhabitants could not provide themselves with food. Here we found a solution.
If there is such a survival mechanism in nature, why couldn’t primitive people use it? Moreover, science knows primates that fall into hibernation – dwarf lemurs from Madagascar.
—
Online:
Contact us: [email protected]
Our Standards, Terms of Use: Standard Terms And Conditions.