Story at a glance
- Many animals, including mammals, and plants hibernate during the winter to preserve themselves until food is more abundant.
- A new study of a now-extinct predecessor to humans suggests that they may have hibernated as well.
- Still, there are other explanations for the findings, which have not yet been confirmed.
For some people, the harsh cold of winter brings everything to a halt. With less hours in the day and motivation in the tank, sleeping in and cozying up indoors feels like the only way to make it through. Call it modern day hibernating.
In fact, humans might have actually hibernated to survive harsh winters in the past, according to a study published in “L’Anthropologie” this month.
It’s not too much of a stretch, considering other mammals such as bears and bats also hibernate during the winter.
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“This suggests that the genetic basis and physiology for such a hypometabolism could be preserved in many mammalian species including humans,” said authors Juan-Luis Arsuaga and Antonis Bartsiokas.
So a team of anthropologists studied the hominin skeletal collection (bones) from Sima de los Huesos, Cave Mayor, Atapuerca, Spain, where fossils date back more than 400,000 years. What they found were several lesions, tumors, rachitic osteo plaques and other evidence of “poorly tolerated hibernation in dark cavernous hibernacula.”
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The remains of adolescent members of this now extinct human species showed gaps that were healed in the adults, indicating “bouts of arousal from hibernation.” Basically, as other mammals did, the study found reason to believe humans remained “in metabolic states that helped them to survive for long periods of time in frigid conditions with limited supplies of food and enough stores of body fat.”
Of course, these findings are not conclusive.
“It is a very interesting argument and it will certainly stimulate debate,” forensic anthropologist Patrick Randolph-Quinney of Northumbria University in Newcastle told the Guardian. “However, there are other explanations for the variations seen in the bones found in Sima and these have to be addressed fully before we can come to any realistic conclusions. That has not been done yet, I believe.”
Still, the next time this winter you feel the urge to curl up and take a nap, it might be your ancient human nature speaking.
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