The early humans knew how to make winter “bearable.”
New evidence suggests that people who lived in Europe nearly half a million years ago may have coped with the extreme cold by hibernating for months, the Guardian reported.
Fossils excavated from an ancient mass grave in Northern Spain showed months of interrupted bone growth – similar to lesions found on the remains of overwintering mammals such as cave bears, researchers wrote in a paper published in the journal “L’Anthropologie.”
The human bones – which are more than 400,000 years old and likely belonged to early Neanderthals – indicate that our ancestors slowed their metabolism and slept during harsh winters “to survive the frigid conditions and food scarcity,” the scientists said.
“A strategy of hibernation would have been the only solution to survival by spending months in a cave because of the frigid 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 – “causing them to resort to cave sleep,” the paper said.
The ancient humans were likely “in metabolic states that helped them survive for long periods in frigid conditions with limited food supplies and ample supplies of body fat,” the scientists wrote.
The bones have been excavated in the Sima de los Huesos Cave, also known as “the bone pit” – one of the world’s most important fossil sites.
The remains of hibernating cave bears were also found in the Sima well.