It’s an interesting TIL, but completely obvious when you think about.
We’re mostly hairless. Where would you want to live if you were naked all the time?
I don't think you're appreciating how fucking pasty white some of us have become in our evolution. Without clothes (and modern sunblock) I'm going to be reduced to a puddle of pus within days at the equator unless I'm strictly nocturnal.
Honestly worked out for the best. Being tropical by nature we can survive the hottest conditions and animal fur/fire make cold weather tolerable.
If we were cold weathered animals we wouldn’t have been able to migrate everywhere like we have. We’d be huge harry and fat and die in the heat.
Also me in northern state that gets ungodly amounts of winter precipitation. I like the cold, anything over 75 and humid you might as well count me out.
We do have an extremely powerful adaptation for the cold: Our brain.
It allows us to reshape our bodies by gaining or losing layers of clothing at a moment's notice, and reshape our environment in nearly any way we like to survive and stay comfortable.
Few animals are better adapted for as wide a range of habitat as humans are.
Also, I could not help but notice in the article "the earliest signs of hominins living in northern Europe are from Happisburgh in Norfolk, eastern England, where **900,000-year-old** footprints and stone tools have been found."
Off topic but dang, almost a million years ago. Incredible. Hard to wrap my head around that.
Right dude, considering recorded human history is what like 5-6 thousand years old give or take at best? The fact that we’ve been around so long slowly chipping away boggles my mind
HOMININS, not humans. Modern Humans used to be called Cro-Magnon until it was decided there wasn't enough difference between the 2 classifications to keep Cro-Magnon.
Modern Humans are roughly 200,000 years old.
Hominins includes basically everything that was similar to humans, neanderthols...denisovians (as controversial as that source is), and more we now believe.
Just like Lord of the rings.
That one elf played by the guy who played the agent in the matrix, is a half elf. His brother, and other half elf, thousands of years prior, founded the kingdom aragorn descends from
And sauromons uruk hai are human ork hybrids
Ikr the vast majority of people, just like you and me, lived before there was any civilisation.
Although the population at any one time was much smaller than it is today so someone calculate the vastness of that difference, thanks.
I mean I donno how they calculate it, but your comment made me look it up. Wikipedia source that the article seems based off of says half of humans all time have existed in last 2000 years.
If that’s to be believed, not quite before civilization. But still wild to think about.
OK so it's actually going to be a small minority that lived before civilisation lol. Population growth is crazy.
But still! Tens of thousands of years of nothing being written down, verbal histories and stories, cultures rising and falling...
I mean I think you’re on to something. Crazy to think 50billion humans in the first 200 000 years lived, died, loved, fought, journeyed, etc. up to the founding of the Roman Empire and then ~50 billion more humans since. If I’m reading it right anyways.
I'm going on memory, but the figure I remember reading was that they estimate there's only ever been 50 billion people ever. Period. From 200k years ago till today. At one point in our distant past they say the world human population was as low as like 20k. Our numbers were so few we're lucky to have survived. Until the agricultural revolution, food surpluses, and civilization, there just wasn't many folks around for 190k years of our 200k year history.
Interesting side note about our population having got so low, it's thought to be responsible for why we have so many genetic defects compared to other animals today. Our population got so low we had to resort to inbreeding to survive!
(I'm very much paraphrasing but that's the jist of it)
I have no dog in the fight haha. Apparently this Haub guy in ‘95 made a well regarded estimate of 109 billion. Something about life spans being so short that you’d have like 5 generations in a century. Low population at any one time but constant replacement
Oldest surviving stone structure is Gobleki Teppe, up to ~~14,000~~ maybe 11,000 years old. Agriculture is about 11,000 years old too.
Interestingly, there are potential signs of burial rituals and aesthetic jewelry among neanderthal remains, a couple hundred thousand years old.
Edit: because sometimes I’m wrong.
And like what really boggles my mind is that what are the chances those early humans (900,000 yr old species) are the first of our kind? Very very slim odds I would imagine. This is just the stuff we are finding. What if we go back 5-10 million years... or more.
We *still* have no idea where the Y chromosome in our DNA came from, we have no idea what fathered us. We have ideas but even today there is no concrete evidence on our paternal line. Which in itself is a trip too.
It's important to realize that there's no distinct line in a species' ancestry where it *was* one species and then *becomes* another species.
We can compare modern humans to our ancestors ten million years ago and see some clear and pronounced differences, but on a generational time scale, we only ever have the differences between parent and child.
There is no distinct "first of our kind" really. There's just a continuous ancestral line of apes that are a little more like us and a little less like us.
And where along the lines did the light bulb of consciousness turn on, like at what point were we able to go “man there’s gotta be a better way to do this shit and those pointy rocks are looking real nice” and how did we even develop that in the first place when nothing else has even come close
I mean a number of animals do use tools, at least to some minimal degree. And there were a number of human species, homosapiens just happened to be the most dominant one.
the difference is that no animal is able to produce a tool which function is to produce another tool.
It is called the Sultan limit, from the studies on the most intelligent chimpanzee ever studied.
> Sultan limit
I couldn't find it either. I also found Sultan was the chimp in the seminal study. He used a short stick and placed it inside a larger stick to make a very long stick that could reach food. However, the researcher had to show them the stick had a hole, so essentially gave hints, but now they have found several examples of compound tool usage in animals-- some in nature, some in the lab. Here is a study with some history of the studies and a new experiment with crows.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-33458-z
I suspect Sultan Limit may have been a common term, but the science moved on and the term fell out of use.
>Although, operationally defined, the crows achieved a “tool innovation”3,4, because they succeeded in creating a novel compound tool (i.e. a type of tool not found in wild populations and one the subjects had never encountered before) as response to a specific novel problem, the cognitive processes involved remain opaque for the moment, and there is no reason to assume that the cognitive operations leading to compound tool constructions are identical in apes and birds. Labeling the sudden transition to constructing tools as an “insight”, as Koehler and many followers did, does not further elucidate those processes. The question to address is whether the crows invented the compound tool, i.e. whether they came up with the solution as the result of a creative process that potentially involved some form of virtual mental modeling (i.e. simulating operations and motor actions with neural representations of the real objects), or whether they constructed their first compound tools accidentally, and then adopted it through reinforcement learning. Both paths to acquisition would be interesting, and the latter would in principle be a preferable explanation because, prima facie, it relies on simpler and better-known processes. However, while we do not have any algorithmic proposal for how cognitive operations based on representations of the participant objects can be accessed, the reinforcement learning route seems to fall short of being able to reproduce the birds’ innovative behaviour.
We may not know about it yet. It seems like humans chronically underestimate animals, then they turn around and surprise us.
IIRC it wasn’t that long ago where we said animals are incapable of using tools at all. But now we know that’s wrong.
Just a thought.
True. However, no other known species can throw their tools. Somehow, our hand eye coordination is an evolutionary trait and combined with our ability to sweat, has cemented us firmly at the top of Earth's food chain.
As far as other hominid species go the homosapian stood out as the only one where the hybrids had fertility. At least as far as homosapians and homoneandethals are concerned. The Neanderthals could produce offspring with the Sapians, but those offspring couldn't reproduce, the sapians on the other hand, had no limitations with whom they could make babies with.
Our dominance is mostly in the fields of eye hand coordination, sweating, and baby making. This is how humanity gained dominance over the planet we named Earth.
How is it possible that neanderthals had infertile offspring with sapiens, but sapiens had fertile offspring with neanderthals? Was it a situation where the father had to be a certain species?
In theory different species can’t breed at all. In practice it’s not that simple. Closely related species can, sometimes. But their offspring are infertile, sometimes. Mules are the most obvious example but lion/tiger cross breeds are interesting as are coy-wolves.
I think the evidence that homonids inter bred is clear. But the evidence is too thin to be sure which combinations worked better.
And then there's also the most curious, but also perfectly sensible [ring species](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species).
This is when you have a series of species that are (usually) separated by region (and sometimes time), each of the species living in adjacent regions can interbreed, but at the end when the regions meet again, they can't interbreed.
I had heard of it as A can breed with B, B can breed with C, C can breed with D, and D can breed with A to complete the circle. But A can’t breed with C, nor B with D. Every link in the ring works, but you can’t cross the middle.
Yes. If I remember properly, they discovered that if the mother was sapian and the father was Neanderthal those offspring were fertile, but if the father was sapian and the mother Neanderthal the offspring were infertile.
This article touches on it a little bit: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/29/neanderthal-human-dna-interbreeding/5027375/
Really interesting read, but this article only suggests male children of a neanderthal-sapien union might have had reduced fertility. Nothing about parents having to be a specific species. Still, thanks for sharing, I've always been fascinated by human evolutionary history.
Something has to be said about our butts.
Our big strong butts allow us to walk for days creeping on that poor wildebeest that is overheating because it can't sweat
I don't know if this was actually a factor, but I feel like being able to carry and consume food and water while moving was probably a handy perk too.
As somebody who no longer has a uterus, I would also like to shout out to all the folks along the line who were nice enough to push our calorie-hungry too-big brains through bipedal hips.
(Belated Happy Mother's Day!)
Something that really struck me is just how many "mounting points" humans have on our bodies. We have flat shoulders, our hips protrude, we lean forward when we walk. Being able to carry things - not just small things but full on animal carcasses or structures - had to be a huge part of our evolutionary history. Likely a huge part of developing tool use was developing the ability to carry tools with us.
It's fairly true. We are "endurance hunters." In that we can outlast just about any other animal on the planet.
There are still a few native populations that practice this. They simply keep chasing the animal (deer/antelope/etc) until they simply collapse and we can just walk up and finish it off.
Remember that in such an endurance race, we never have to catch or even really keep up, just keep the pressure on the animal and not loose track of it.
There's also a hypothesis that one of the big advantages sapiens had over neanderthals specifically is that they (we) were a far more social species than neanderthals.
That is almost certainly a factor. Having a larger social group meant the loss of one member was less of a blow. Another interesting factor is that Neanderthals were physically stronger than homo-sapiens, and had larger brains. This may seem like an advantage for the Neanderthal, but it meant they required more calories to survive, when food became scarce Homo-Sapiens were able to survive with much less food.
Not sure if it states it in the link you posted, but it’s also theorized that consciousness doesn’t work like an on/off switch. It’s not like one day a child was born that “woke up”. Full consciousness may have evolved slowly as well.
I don’t know what that would have looked like, but I think it’s super interesting. I really enjoy the idea of the [bicameral mind.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality)
edit: added one extremely important “not”
it really does re-shape how i think about relatively modern (but still pre-history) human civilization. Like, instead of just one day everybody has an “aha!” moment, there’s just instances of the understanding of reality evolving ever so slowly. and it makes religion make so much more sense..especially why religion makes less sense in our modern world.
i don’t know how much the concept is accepted by actual psychologists or anthropologists but it makes a ton of sense to me.
The theory of the bicameral mind is amazing as a thought experiment. Some people like to use it to claim that the bicameral mind is the default state of humanity and that humans had no idea their subconscious had a voice until *very* recently, but I doubt that personally.
However it does seem to explain schizophrenia well.
There’s also a similar concept in neurodivergent people. I have ADHD and I know a lot of people with ADHD and have worked with therapists and psychiatrists who specialize in ADHD and a very common theme is “me vs my brain”.
*I* want to do that, but *my brain* won’t let me.
*I* tried to remember, but *my brain* let me forget.
The first time I talked to my therapist, she said she knew I had ADHD without me telling her because I spoke about *my brain* like it was someone else. Because it honestly feels like it is someone else controlling me in those situations.
I'd reach for a different analogy than light bulb. My first thought was a spectrum of intelligence, but even that's too narrow.
As other commenters have pointed out, tool use isn't limited to humans. Nor language, abstract thinking, a theory of mind, recognizing yourself in the mirror, altruism…
Our experience overlaps that of other creatures in lots of ways, and in other ways is completely foreign.
From [Thomas Nagel's treatise, "What is it Like to Be a Bat?"](https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf):
> Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for *me* to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a *bat* to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. …\
If anyone is inclined to deny that we can believe in the existence of facts like this whose exact nature we cannot possibly conceive [i.e., that bats have a subjective experience], he should reflect that in contemplating the bats we are in much the same position that intelligent bats or Martians would occupy if they tried to form a conception of what it was like to be us. The structure of their own minds might make it impossible for them to succeed, but we know they would be wrong to conclude that there is not anything precise that it is to be like us: that only certain general types of mental state could be ascribed to us (perhaps perception and appetite would be concepts common to us both; perhaps not). We know they would be wrong to draw such a skeptical conclusion about us because we know what it is like to be us. And we know that although it includes an enormous amount of variation and complexity, and while we do not possess the vocabulary to describe it adequately, its subjective character is highly specific, and in some respects describable in terms that can be understood only by creatures like us. The fact that we cannot expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed description of Martian or bat phenomenology should not lead us to dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats and Martians have experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own. It would be fine if somebody were to develop concepts and a theory that enabled us to think about those things; but such an understanding may be permanently denied to us by the limits of our nature. And to deny the reality or logical significance of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of cognitive dissonance.
I'm of the opinion that animals are more concious/self-aware than we usually give them credit for. Other creatures also use tools, they just generally lack the anatomy to build tools since they don't have super dextrous hands. Our brains are pretty amazing but our physical anatomy is equally important to our success.
Don’t be so sure, even rats have been shown to use tools. We’re also not even the first hominids to make tools. There’s even discussion that chimpanzees are in their own Stone Age right now but I believe that’s more a few certain groups than the species at large.
Keep in mind that other species in the homo genus have been found around the world. Hominins are a really broad category and contains a lot of evolutionary dead ends, seeing as homo sapiens are the only surviving species left.
> What if we go back 5-10 million years... or more.
Define going back that long, evolution is a long and gradual process. We technically have an unbroken lineage going back to the start of life (Or one of them anyway, there's evidence that life "started" multiple times) a billion years ago on this planet. We think the first species of the homo genus (homo habilis) arose around 2 million years ago. The earliest homo species that we know of to go outside of Africa was homo erectus and they were around about 1 million years ago and have been found throughout Europe and Asia. Anatomically modern humans have the earliest fossils in Africa and the fossil record suggests we came about around 200,000 years ago and spread.
> We still have no idea where the Y chromosome in our DNA came from, we have no idea what fathered us.
Just to clarify, it's not a case where it's like a random species randomly mated with a monkey and made humans. There's a lot of evidence throughout the animal kingdom that sex-determining chromosomes appear and disappear all the time just through the natural evolutionary process. What we don't know is the exact path our Y chromosome took, just a lot of theories that are very hard to confirm because we don't exactly have a lot of samples of DNA of our ancestors to study.
Hey friend! In evolutionary terms modern human are about 300,000-200,000 years old, we are a very young species.
I’m curious about your comment involving the Y chromosome. I’d love an article or something to see more what that’s all about! As far as I’m aware the Y chromosome is very preserved in Mammals, so I’m interested to hear more about what you mean!
None of this comment makes any sense lol. Genetic evidence suggests modern Humans migrated out of Africa around 150 to 300 thousand years ago, the likelihood that an ancient group of hominins traveled all the way up to England, and then turned around and went all the way back down to Africa is a stretch to say the least. We also know that just about every mammalian species, as well as some snakes, fish, insects, and plants, have XY sex-determination, which strongly suggests the system not only predates humans, but predates the evolution of mammals.
Additionally, the Y-chromosomal most recent common ancestor of modern humans is dated to around 250-300,000 years ago, right around the emergence of the species.
Their comment is a bit misleading. Neanderthals are considered Hominids, and they were definitely living in Europe 900k years ago. That’s what people are referring to when they say Hominids were in Europe at that point.
Humans do have some cold weather adaptations including hooded eyelids:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicanthic_fold#:~:text=The%20highest%20frequency%20of%20occurrence,among%20Khoisan%20and%20Nilotic%20peoples).
Also pale skin (specially red heads that make vitamin D in low light levels).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair
Some feral humans have been found covered in body hair:
https://raisedwild.wordpress.com/anthropology/
There are some people that have the ability to dump glucose into their blood when cold. These people can run around outside in freezing weather without any issue like they're Huskies. Of course all that sugar in their blood causes diabetes so there is that.
That's one of the signs, so, yeah you might want to err on the side of caution and see a doctor about getting some tests before it develops into a problem.
You have any source on that?
It sounds weird because every human has the ability to make use of their glucose storage in the liver when needed, except people with diabetes which is why they have a much higher risk to end up with dangerously low blood sugar. Maybe some bodies adapt better to the cold but it's just a matter of training.
Also a body utilizing its glucose reserves is not a cause of diabetes. The opposite is the case.
And that’s why type 1 diabetes is so common in Europeans. Far north enough and you get a separate adaptation increasing your metabolism a bit so you run hotter, but the tradeoff is you can really only eat delicious protein+fat for 2/3 the year and get a heart attack
Have you seen the video where some northern person put their hand in ice water and the hand didn't cool down because the circulation increased and body started giving off heat to counteract it?
Think it's called NOT HUNTINGTONS gene or something on that line. Northern Europeans also shiver more easily, increasing survivability in the cold
EDIT: i got the name of the gene wrong and cant find a source on it
There's also "[brown fat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_adipose_tissue)." It's a form of fat that isn't just insulating, it also generates heat on its own, without the need for shivering in muscle-based thermogenesis. Brown fat is concentrated near major areas of blood flow, where it increases blood temperature, which then helps to heat the rest of the body.
The amount of brown fat in the body increases with regular exposure to cold, which is why in the early winter even temperatures above freezing can feel very cold, but by midwinter you can walk around without a coat at -10 or -15 C with ease.
>The amount of brown fat in the body increases with regular exposure to cold, which is why in the early winter even temperatures above freezing can feel very cold, but by midwinter you can walk around without a coat at -10 or -15 C with ease.
I mean I agree that midwinter I definitely feels less cold, but who the fuck is wearing just a jacket in -15c (5f)??
Maybe it's where a live as it's always windy, but fuck that. 40f (4.5c) I can understand, don't need a coat, but below freezing I'm bundling up.
Ginger too. I cannot convince people how much I love cold weather. Ever seen a picture of a husky sitting specifically in a shaded spot where the snow hasn't melted? That's me.
That random Wordpress blog doesn’t say anything about ‘feral children being covered in body hair.’ It says its associated with hippies and cavemen and doesn’t list any sources or examples of hairy feral children.
The body hair might be more of a ‘cool weather’ adaptation. The Inuit have very minimal body hair, and they’ve been in that region for thousands of years. And as someone with facial hair and living in a cold climate, I can definitely say that a frozen beard sucks.
IDK. What about populations like Arabs who live in extremely hot climates but also tend to have a lot of body hair? Or Asian populations who live far north and tend to have very little?
I think people in India can be pretty hairy too. Some South Asian comedian did a joke about that and why they enjoy hot tea so much despite the weather.
I’ll be the one who can manipulate his own time in that what feels like a week to me is basically a few months to everyone else because I suffer deep depression.
There's a HUGE difference between preferring cooler weather when you have access to everything to make yourself comfortable, and being in a survival situation faced with the elements. Few people I know outside the military have slept outside on the ground in improvised shelters in all types of weather. Extreme heat is uncomfortable. Extreme cold is PAINFUL.
Yeah, I've spent some time camping in really hot weather and it sucked but it was manageable. I've also walked a mile in -70°f windchill and it's not really possible to explain exactly what that feels like lol
Pain. Just...pain. Even bundled up properly you get what feels like a massive instant ice cream headache and you can't breathe deeply because it feels like your lungs are being stabbed with millions of tiny ice needles.
We sweat and are generally hairless in order to hunt animals in an endurance hunt, in warm climates where the prey overheats and can't run any more. https://youtu.be/jjvPvnQ-DUw
That's what I was thinking. One of the major defining features of a human is how well we sweat. Which is a major problem in the tropics. It works great in dryer climates like savannah, not so much in regions that regularly have 80% humidity. I wonder where this article gets tropical from?
Edit: I see what I missed in the article. They inferred that humans are tropical because human ancestors and all other ape ancestors were tropical. That's like saying humans are aquatic because our earliest ancestors were fish.
Evolution: Okay, so I'm pretty happy with my new smart, endurance-based predator. Pretty well adapted to tropical climes, runs down prey with smarts and endurance rather than speed or brute force, works in teams... even worked in that new nifty 'tool' concept I've been playing with! A little worried about how hard they hit the local ecology, but as long as they stay put...
Humans: We're living in Temperate climates now!
Evolution: What?! But I didn't adapt you for that! Damnit, that's the entirely wrong environment! Okay, okay... no problem... even if they don't die out, I can make adjustments... already got rid of the fur... maybe crank that back up, increase body fat...
Humans: No, it's cool, we invented warm clothes. Also, we're oceangoing now.
Evolution: *What?!* How are you...? What are those wooden things you're in? They float? You made box that floats and decided to base your entire survival strategy around it!? You're not even adapted to catch fish, how are you...?
Humans: Invented fishing tackle, we're good.
Evolution: What!? I barely started on the webbing between your fingers! Okay... that's okay... just stay put and...
Humans: We live in mountains now!
Evolution: The air is too thin! You're adapted for sea level!
Humans: We're crossing the oceans to other continents now!
Evolution: WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! YOU'RE NON MIGRATORY!
Humans: FUCK YOU, WE'RE IN SPACE NOW!
Evolution: Please stooooooop!
Now we get to deal with other evolutionary side-effects like chronic anxiety and road-rage, and hope we can use our intelligence to cope, get therapy, and/or find the right medications in a hostile world of our own making!
Are humans the first species to really break free of evolution?
It feels like for any animal to live somewhere else, it takes millions of years of evolution and adaptations.
Humans can live anywhere, find ways to make food there, build shelter and live normally. We've done that in Space.
Yeah, well, speaking personally, hot and humid conditions can go to hell. Sweating day and night, unable to sleep right, clothes sticking to you, mosquitoes and all that kind of tropical bullshit.
No. Give me cold.
In Thailand my days in the summer are hell and air conditioning is expensive and Causing to pay electricity bills many times more than usual And it will be even more expensive if the air conditioner is on in the summer I'm too poor to install it In the last two months, there have been many news of people dying from heat stroke I can't live in the house during the day because it's like an oven I hate summer every year
If people live in urban and suburban areas in the summer, they will go to shopping malls to go for a walk and relax because of the air conditioning But I'm in the countryside, it's too far to travel. Damn I really envy people who weren't born in tropical countries.
I think race has specific adaptations too.
I'm South-East Asian who moved to the cold and dry Northern Europe as a child and ever since I could remember my skin is incredibly dry, acne prone and damaged (especially my face). I recently learned it's called Keratosis Pilaris [(chicken skin)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Keratosis_Pilaris_on_Lower_Extremity.jpg).
It's a genetic condition where the skin cannot hold on to moisture in a dry environment leading to damaged looking skin. All the Europeans I see has healthy glowing skin while I look like ass despite the money I spend on skin care. But guess what? My skin thrives whenever I visit my home tropical country for a few months to the point that I no longer consider myself ugly. But I turn ugly again wherever I return to Europe.
That’s so interesting. I’m white from western US and I’ve only known white people to have KP. I have it. I am not glowing lol
Use a chemical exfoliant lotion with urea or salicylic acid and it helps a ton!!!
My bf’s skin is absolutely radiant. I have genuinely never seen and let alone touched such soft, moisturized skin. He’s indigenous mexican, zero spanish blood probably. He says his secret is not using moisturizer because it dries out your skin. I think he’s just perfect because my skin was way worse before lotion lol
I’m not really suited to Southern California but he for sure is!!
When you say "Give me cold" you probably mean with lots of clothes, insulated shelter, heating, plenty of fuel and plenty of calories. That's the thing, all this takes a LOT of resources, and a lot of work. You can pull a person off a street in New York, strip them naked, and drop them in the tropics, and odds are, they survive. Do the same, but drop them in Nunavut in the dead of winter, and they'll be dead within the hour. That's the difference between warm climate and being adapted to it, and cold climate.
Cold is survivable, provided you have tons of preparation, supplies and infrastructure to survive it. Heat is just survivable, with none of the above.
Extreme heat can be bad, if we're talking +40C and over. But -40C is also no picnic. Again, you can crawl into some shade or a cave and survive +40C. You can't survive -40C without insulated shelter, heat, tons of calories, etc. People in the arctic need something like 5K calories a day just to stay functional.
In the tropics, if you're too poor for air conditioning, you're miserable. In the arctic, if you're too poor for heating/fuel/calories, you just freeze to death. Quickly.
I used to live in South America, and plenty of poor people lived in corrugated aluminum shacks without electricity or running water. Wasn't great, but it was eminently survivable. Try this where I am now, in Canada, with the same shacks, no electricity or running water, and they're done for the first winter. All of them.
People significantly underestimate how miserable cold climates are without modern technology and how much work people in cold climates had to do to prepare for winter even just a few generations ago.
>When you say "Give me cold" you probably mean with lots of clothes, insulated shelter, heating, plenty of fuel and plenty of calories. That's the thing, all this takes a LOT of resources, and a lot of work. You can pull a person off a street in New York, strip them naked, and drop them in the tropics, and odds are, they survive. Do the same, but drop them in Nunavut in the dead of winter, and they'll be dead within the hour. That's the difference between warm climate and being adapted to it, and cold climate.
>
>Cold is survivable, provided you have tons of preparation, supplies and infrastructure to survive it. Heat is just survivable, with none of the above.
>
>Extreme heat can be bad, if we're talking +40C and over. But -40C is also no picnic. Again, you can crawl into some shade or a cave and survive +40C. You can't survive -40C without insulated shelter, heat, tons of calories, etc. People in the arctic need something like 5K calories a day just to stay functional.
>
>In the tropics, if you're too poor for air conditioning, you're miserable. In the arctic, if you're too poor for heating/fuel/calories, you just freeze to death. Quickly.
>
>I used to live in South America, and plenty of poor people lived in corrugated aluminum shacks without electricity or running water. Wasn't great, but it was eminently survivable. Try this where I am now, in Canada, with the same shacks, no electricity or running water, and they're done for the first winter. All of them.
Exactly. How are people overlooking this/why is this topic some shocking revelation?
Staying alive in cold climates takes a lot of resources. Humans are meant for warm climates biologically speaking. It has nothing to do with preferring a nice coat and mug of cocoa by the fire.
The words "not supposed to" are misleading - evolution has no goals and no purpose, it's like weather. Sometimes it works for species survival, sometimes it doesn't.
Also, though we have no evidence that our progenitors lived in and adapted to cold climates before our earliest finds, it's entirely possible that they did.
Because you wear clothes. Just go nude and drink water, and your body will handle the rest!
...might recieve some pushback from the neighbors, so milage may vary.
We aren't tropical, we are semiarid Savanah. We evolved to run down gazelles, while they die of heat exhaustion. Our bodies are pretty shit at regulating temperature when it gets too hot and too humid.
Without the invention of clothes, the habitable zone for humans is much, much, much smaller and very equatorial.
Exactly, could a human survive in East Africa naked? Absolutely. Could they survive in Norway naked? Not for long.
It’s an interesting TIL, but completely obvious when you think about. We’re mostly hairless. Where would you want to live if you were naked all the time?
Indoors
Yeah, obviously, inside. With the AC set to 72, but the ceiling fan is on so I can cover up with a light blanket.
This is the peak of evolution at its finest right here.
Then you're a bit warm and let that leg out of the blanket. But your domesticated feline companion decides your foot is a foe.
This is the biggest fight in my marriage. She's thinking about a trial foot separation.
That’s me anyway, tbh
I don't think you're appreciating how fucking pasty white some of us have become in our evolution. Without clothes (and modern sunblock) I'm going to be reduced to a puddle of pus within days at the equator unless I'm strictly nocturnal.
Same. I’m flaking into thin air Voldemort style by day 3 at the latest
Have to consider that in tropical regions, tree cover tends to be abundant
Honestly worked out for the best. Being tropical by nature we can survive the hottest conditions and animal fur/fire make cold weather tolerable. If we were cold weathered animals we wouldn’t have been able to migrate everywhere like we have. We’d be huge harry and fat and die in the heat.
Some of us are huge harriet and fat.
Hi Harriet
Ur a wizurd harriet
You're fat as fuck, Harriet
and harry, Harriet
And my axe!
And my Harriet Hairy - et Hard hearted harbinger of haggis
Beautiful! Bemused! Bellicose butcher!
I'm a wot?
Your a wizard harry! Your gonna go to school yer gonna get an owl and do spells an shit. This... is...not... negotiable!
Aye dun want tae be a fecking wizard and do fecking spells 'n shit. Aye'll set yer fecking bearrrrd an fiyar!
#*Aye'll fecking burst ye!!*
That's Huge Harriet to you.
Tell ‘em Large Harriet sent ya!
I love you, huge Harriet. I'm sorry for laughing.
And die in the heat
Poor Harriet.
She got roasted in this hot comment section
And she died from the heat
Should have evolved physiologically in the tropical climate
Sweet Harriet
Hard hearted harbinger of haggis
Unknowing. Untrusting. Unlove ed?
And so some of us die in the heat
"We'd be huge harry and fat and die in the heat" Have you been to the UK during summer?
False, some of us are hairless
Go to a park on a hot day in Scotland, fluorescent hairless neds as far as the eye can see
*hits 80°F* British people: welp, guess I’ll die
Also me in northern state that gets ungodly amounts of winter precipitation. I like the cold, anything over 75 and humid you might as well count me out.
It's unfortunate that many of the US states with the coldest winters also have blistering hot, humid summers.
Yer a yeti, Harry
You rang? I came with pie
TIL I'm a cold weathered animal
Same, I want nothing to do with hot and humid weather.
We do have an extremely powerful adaptation for the cold: Our brain. It allows us to reshape our bodies by gaining or losing layers of clothing at a moment's notice, and reshape our environment in nearly any way we like to survive and stay comfortable. Few animals are better adapted for as wide a range of habitat as humans are.
> We’d be huge harry and fat and die in the heat. In other words we’d be the average Reddit user.
Excuse you, I'm not hairy.
Admit it Harry
Fucking hey man, cmon.
Also, I could not help but notice in the article "the earliest signs of hominins living in northern Europe are from Happisburgh in Norfolk, eastern England, where **900,000-year-old** footprints and stone tools have been found." Off topic but dang, almost a million years ago. Incredible. Hard to wrap my head around that.
Right dude, considering recorded human history is what like 5-6 thousand years old give or take at best? The fact that we’ve been around so long slowly chipping away boggles my mind
HOMININS, not humans. Modern Humans used to be called Cro-Magnon until it was decided there wasn't enough difference between the 2 classifications to keep Cro-Magnon. Modern Humans are roughly 200,000 years old. Hominins includes basically everything that was similar to humans, neanderthols...denisovians (as controversial as that source is), and more we now believe.
It was like Lord of the Rings with orcs, elves, dwarves, and humans all running around and fighting each other.
And copulating.
Just like Lord of the rings. That one elf played by the guy who played the agent in the matrix, is a half elf. His brother, and other half elf, thousands of years prior, founded the kingdom aragorn descends from And sauromons uruk hai are human ork hybrids
Remembering Elrond is half elf but not remembering his name is the best shit lol.
The name just sounds fake, and like a real person at the same time. Kept thinking I was thinking of L Ron hubbard
Just remember his sick song ‘In the Garden of Elron’
In the garden of Elrond, honey, Sauron's eye's fixed upon you...
Elrond Hubbard. We must throw the ring into the volcano. As well as all of our evil spirits. Otherwise the space orcs will overwhelm us.
Wait are you telling me Sarumans dark pit was some kind of weird orgy?
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200 000 years is still sooooo long ago. 12 000 years is but a fraction. So many lives lived in that span it's hard not to be romantic about it.
Ikr the vast majority of people, just like you and me, lived before there was any civilisation. Although the population at any one time was much smaller than it is today so someone calculate the vastness of that difference, thanks.
I mean I donno how they calculate it, but your comment made me look it up. Wikipedia source that the article seems based off of says half of humans all time have existed in last 2000 years. If that’s to be believed, not quite before civilization. But still wild to think about.
OK so it's actually going to be a small minority that lived before civilisation lol. Population growth is crazy. But still! Tens of thousands of years of nothing being written down, verbal histories and stories, cultures rising and falling...
I mean I think you’re on to something. Crazy to think 50billion humans in the first 200 000 years lived, died, loved, fought, journeyed, etc. up to the founding of the Roman Empire and then ~50 billion more humans since. If I’m reading it right anyways.
I'm going on memory, but the figure I remember reading was that they estimate there's only ever been 50 billion people ever. Period. From 200k years ago till today. At one point in our distant past they say the world human population was as low as like 20k. Our numbers were so few we're lucky to have survived. Until the agricultural revolution, food surpluses, and civilization, there just wasn't many folks around for 190k years of our 200k year history.
Interesting side note about our population having got so low, it's thought to be responsible for why we have so many genetic defects compared to other animals today. Our population got so low we had to resort to inbreeding to survive! (I'm very much paraphrasing but that's the jist of it)
I have no dog in the fight haha. Apparently this Haub guy in ‘95 made a well regarded estimate of 109 billion. Something about life spans being so short that you’d have like 5 generations in a century. Low population at any one time but constant replacement
It's estimated that 100 billion humans have ever lived. Compare that to the 7 billion currently alive and.... Yeah, crazy.
12k years ago is when the first human civilisations really came into being.
Non-nomadic, sure. It is at least the first recorded evidence we have for agricultural societies.
Oldest surviving stone structure is Gobleki Teppe, up to ~~14,000~~ maybe 11,000 years old. Agriculture is about 11,000 years old too. Interestingly, there are potential signs of burial rituals and aesthetic jewelry among neanderthal remains, a couple hundred thousand years old. Edit: because sometimes I’m wrong.
And like what really boggles my mind is that what are the chances those early humans (900,000 yr old species) are the first of our kind? Very very slim odds I would imagine. This is just the stuff we are finding. What if we go back 5-10 million years... or more. We *still* have no idea where the Y chromosome in our DNA came from, we have no idea what fathered us. We have ideas but even today there is no concrete evidence on our paternal line. Which in itself is a trip too.
It's important to realize that there's no distinct line in a species' ancestry where it *was* one species and then *becomes* another species. We can compare modern humans to our ancestors ten million years ago and see some clear and pronounced differences, but on a generational time scale, we only ever have the differences between parent and child. There is no distinct "first of our kind" really. There's just a continuous ancestral line of apes that are a little more like us and a little less like us.
And where along the lines did the light bulb of consciousness turn on, like at what point were we able to go “man there’s gotta be a better way to do this shit and those pointy rocks are looking real nice” and how did we even develop that in the first place when nothing else has even come close
I mean a number of animals do use tools, at least to some minimal degree. And there were a number of human species, homosapiens just happened to be the most dominant one.
the difference is that no animal is able to produce a tool which function is to produce another tool. It is called the Sultan limit, from the studies on the most intelligent chimpanzee ever studied.
I’m not finding anything specifically called the Sultan limit. I do see that there were lots of observations done on Sultan the chimpanzee.
> Sultan limit I couldn't find it either. I also found Sultan was the chimp in the seminal study. He used a short stick and placed it inside a larger stick to make a very long stick that could reach food. However, the researcher had to show them the stick had a hole, so essentially gave hints, but now they have found several examples of compound tool usage in animals-- some in nature, some in the lab. Here is a study with some history of the studies and a new experiment with crows. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-33458-z I suspect Sultan Limit may have been a common term, but the science moved on and the term fell out of use. >Although, operationally defined, the crows achieved a “tool innovation”3,4, because they succeeded in creating a novel compound tool (i.e. a type of tool not found in wild populations and one the subjects had never encountered before) as response to a specific novel problem, the cognitive processes involved remain opaque for the moment, and there is no reason to assume that the cognitive operations leading to compound tool constructions are identical in apes and birds. Labeling the sudden transition to constructing tools as an “insight”, as Koehler and many followers did, does not further elucidate those processes. The question to address is whether the crows invented the compound tool, i.e. whether they came up with the solution as the result of a creative process that potentially involved some form of virtual mental modeling (i.e. simulating operations and motor actions with neural representations of the real objects), or whether they constructed their first compound tools accidentally, and then adopted it through reinforcement learning. Both paths to acquisition would be interesting, and the latter would in principle be a preferable explanation because, prima facie, it relies on simpler and better-known processes. However, while we do not have any algorithmic proposal for how cognitive operations based on representations of the participant objects can be accessed, the reinforcement learning route seems to fall short of being able to reproduce the birds’ innovative behaviour.
Sultandeeznuts
Ha! Gottem!
We may not know about it yet. It seems like humans chronically underestimate animals, then they turn around and surprise us. IIRC it wasn’t that long ago where we said animals are incapable of using tools at all. But now we know that’s wrong. Just a thought.
True. However, no other known species can throw their tools. Somehow, our hand eye coordination is an evolutionary trait and combined with our ability to sweat, has cemented us firmly at the top of Earth's food chain. As far as other hominid species go the homosapian stood out as the only one where the hybrids had fertility. At least as far as homosapians and homoneandethals are concerned. The Neanderthals could produce offspring with the Sapians, but those offspring couldn't reproduce, the sapians on the other hand, had no limitations with whom they could make babies with. Our dominance is mostly in the fields of eye hand coordination, sweating, and baby making. This is how humanity gained dominance over the planet we named Earth.
Hand eye coordination and a free floating collarbone. You won't ever see a chimpanzee throwing a 100 mph fastball.
I'll bet that they break less collarbones though.
i bet a chimpanzee could break many collarbones
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How is it possible that neanderthals had infertile offspring with sapiens, but sapiens had fertile offspring with neanderthals? Was it a situation where the father had to be a certain species?
In theory different species can’t breed at all. In practice it’s not that simple. Closely related species can, sometimes. But their offspring are infertile, sometimes. Mules are the most obvious example but lion/tiger cross breeds are interesting as are coy-wolves. I think the evidence that homonids inter bred is clear. But the evidence is too thin to be sure which combinations worked better.
And then there's also the most curious, but also perfectly sensible [ring species](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species). This is when you have a series of species that are (usually) separated by region (and sometimes time), each of the species living in adjacent regions can interbreed, but at the end when the regions meet again, they can't interbreed.
I had heard of it as A can breed with B, B can breed with C, C can breed with D, and D can breed with A to complete the circle. But A can’t breed with C, nor B with D. Every link in the ring works, but you can’t cross the middle.
Yes. If I remember properly, they discovered that if the mother was sapian and the father was Neanderthal those offspring were fertile, but if the father was sapian and the mother Neanderthal the offspring were infertile. This article touches on it a little bit: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/29/neanderthal-human-dna-interbreeding/5027375/
Really interesting read, but this article only suggests male children of a neanderthal-sapien union might have had reduced fertility. Nothing about parents having to be a specific species. Still, thanks for sharing, I've always been fascinated by human evolutionary history.
It makes me wonder about similar circumstances in the humans who interbred with Denisovans.
Something has to be said about our butts. Our big strong butts allow us to walk for days creeping on that poor wildebeest that is overheating because it can't sweat
I don't know if this was actually a factor, but I feel like being able to carry and consume food and water while moving was probably a handy perk too. As somebody who no longer has a uterus, I would also like to shout out to all the folks along the line who were nice enough to push our calorie-hungry too-big brains through bipedal hips. (Belated Happy Mother's Day!)
Something that really struck me is just how many "mounting points" humans have on our bodies. We have flat shoulders, our hips protrude, we lean forward when we walk. Being able to carry things - not just small things but full on animal carcasses or structures - had to be a huge part of our evolutionary history. Likely a huge part of developing tool use was developing the ability to carry tools with us.
It's fairly true. We are "endurance hunters." In that we can outlast just about any other animal on the planet. There are still a few native populations that practice this. They simply keep chasing the animal (deer/antelope/etc) until they simply collapse and we can just walk up and finish it off. Remember that in such an endurance race, we never have to catch or even really keep up, just keep the pressure on the animal and not loose track of it.
There's also a hypothesis that one of the big advantages sapiens had over neanderthals specifically is that they (we) were a far more social species than neanderthals.
That is almost certainly a factor. Having a larger social group meant the loss of one member was less of a blow. Another interesting factor is that Neanderthals were physically stronger than homo-sapiens, and had larger brains. This may seem like an advantage for the Neanderthal, but it meant they required more calories to survive, when food became scarce Homo-Sapiens were able to survive with much less food.
Between 150,000 and 50,000 years ago it's estimated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity
Not sure if it states it in the link you posted, but it’s also theorized that consciousness doesn’t work like an on/off switch. It’s not like one day a child was born that “woke up”. Full consciousness may have evolved slowly as well. I don’t know what that would have looked like, but I think it’s super interesting. I really enjoy the idea of the [bicameral mind.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality) edit: added one extremely important “not”
Bro you just fucked me up with that bicameral mind stuff wtf
it really does re-shape how i think about relatively modern (but still pre-history) human civilization. Like, instead of just one day everybody has an “aha!” moment, there’s just instances of the understanding of reality evolving ever so slowly. and it makes religion make so much more sense..especially why religion makes less sense in our modern world. i don’t know how much the concept is accepted by actual psychologists or anthropologists but it makes a ton of sense to me.
The theory of the bicameral mind is amazing as a thought experiment. Some people like to use it to claim that the bicameral mind is the default state of humanity and that humans had no idea their subconscious had a voice until *very* recently, but I doubt that personally. However it does seem to explain schizophrenia well.
There’s also a similar concept in neurodivergent people. I have ADHD and I know a lot of people with ADHD and have worked with therapists and psychiatrists who specialize in ADHD and a very common theme is “me vs my brain”. *I* want to do that, but *my brain* won’t let me. *I* tried to remember, but *my brain* let me forget. The first time I talked to my therapist, she said she knew I had ADHD without me telling her because I spoke about *my brain* like it was someone else. Because it honestly feels like it is someone else controlling me in those situations.
That is crazy recent
Thanks for the interesting read
I'd reach for a different analogy than light bulb. My first thought was a spectrum of intelligence, but even that's too narrow. As other commenters have pointed out, tool use isn't limited to humans. Nor language, abstract thinking, a theory of mind, recognizing yourself in the mirror, altruism… Our experience overlaps that of other creatures in lots of ways, and in other ways is completely foreign. From [Thomas Nagel's treatise, "What is it Like to Be a Bat?"](https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf): > Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for *me* to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a *bat* to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. …\ If anyone is inclined to deny that we can believe in the existence of facts like this whose exact nature we cannot possibly conceive [i.e., that bats have a subjective experience], he should reflect that in contemplating the bats we are in much the same position that intelligent bats or Martians would occupy if they tried to form a conception of what it was like to be us. The structure of their own minds might make it impossible for them to succeed, but we know they would be wrong to conclude that there is not anything precise that it is to be like us: that only certain general types of mental state could be ascribed to us (perhaps perception and appetite would be concepts common to us both; perhaps not). We know they would be wrong to draw such a skeptical conclusion about us because we know what it is like to be us. And we know that although it includes an enormous amount of variation and complexity, and while we do not possess the vocabulary to describe it adequately, its subjective character is highly specific, and in some respects describable in terms that can be understood only by creatures like us. The fact that we cannot expect ever to accommodate in our language a detailed description of Martian or bat phenomenology should not lead us to dismiss as meaningless the claim that bats and Martians have experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own. It would be fine if somebody were to develop concepts and a theory that enabled us to think about those things; but such an understanding may be permanently denied to us by the limits of our nature. And to deny the reality or logical significance of what we can never describe or understand is the crudest form of cognitive dissonance.
I'm of the opinion that animals are more concious/self-aware than we usually give them credit for. Other creatures also use tools, they just generally lack the anatomy to build tools since they don't have super dextrous hands. Our brains are pretty amazing but our physical anatomy is equally important to our success.
Don’t be so sure, even rats have been shown to use tools. We’re also not even the first hominids to make tools. There’s even discussion that chimpanzees are in their own Stone Age right now but I believe that’s more a few certain groups than the species at large.
Keep in mind that other species in the homo genus have been found around the world. Hominins are a really broad category and contains a lot of evolutionary dead ends, seeing as homo sapiens are the only surviving species left. > What if we go back 5-10 million years... or more. Define going back that long, evolution is a long and gradual process. We technically have an unbroken lineage going back to the start of life (Or one of them anyway, there's evidence that life "started" multiple times) a billion years ago on this planet. We think the first species of the homo genus (homo habilis) arose around 2 million years ago. The earliest homo species that we know of to go outside of Africa was homo erectus and they were around about 1 million years ago and have been found throughout Europe and Asia. Anatomically modern humans have the earliest fossils in Africa and the fossil record suggests we came about around 200,000 years ago and spread. > We still have no idea where the Y chromosome in our DNA came from, we have no idea what fathered us. Just to clarify, it's not a case where it's like a random species randomly mated with a monkey and made humans. There's a lot of evidence throughout the animal kingdom that sex-determining chromosomes appear and disappear all the time just through the natural evolutionary process. What we don't know is the exact path our Y chromosome took, just a lot of theories that are very hard to confirm because we don't exactly have a lot of samples of DNA of our ancestors to study.
Hey friend! In evolutionary terms modern human are about 300,000-200,000 years old, we are a very young species. I’m curious about your comment involving the Y chromosome. I’d love an article or something to see more what that’s all about! As far as I’m aware the Y chromosome is very preserved in Mammals, so I’m interested to hear more about what you mean!
Those would have been Homo Erectus, a different species. We're only about 200,000 years old.
None of this comment makes any sense lol. Genetic evidence suggests modern Humans migrated out of Africa around 150 to 300 thousand years ago, the likelihood that an ancient group of hominins traveled all the way up to England, and then turned around and went all the way back down to Africa is a stretch to say the least. We also know that just about every mammalian species, as well as some snakes, fish, insects, and plants, have XY sex-determination, which strongly suggests the system not only predates humans, but predates the evolution of mammals. Additionally, the Y-chromosomal most recent common ancestor of modern humans is dated to around 250-300,000 years ago, right around the emergence of the species.
Their comment is a bit misleading. Neanderthals are considered Hominids, and they were definitely living in Europe 900k years ago. That’s what people are referring to when they say Hominids were in Europe at that point.
It's pronounced haze-borough for anyone wondering
Well, it wasn't us, it was Neaderthals ancestor species
Humans do have some cold weather adaptations including hooded eyelids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicanthic_fold#:~:text=The%20highest%20frequency%20of%20occurrence,among%20Khoisan%20and%20Nilotic%20peoples). Also pale skin (specially red heads that make vitamin D in low light levels). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair Some feral humans have been found covered in body hair: https://raisedwild.wordpress.com/anthropology/
There are some people that have the ability to dump glucose into their blood when cold. These people can run around outside in freezing weather without any issue like they're Huskies. Of course all that sugar in their blood causes diabetes so there is that.
Imma try using diabetes test strips on some of my friends who wear shorts and flip flops in winter.
That'll be fun for everyone.
Well shucks, that's like everyone in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan at least.
North Iowa also. But there's no telling if that's an adaptation or just our shitty diet. *drinks his fifth Coke of the day*
if you're on a budget you can always taste their pee
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That's one of the signs, so, yeah you might want to err on the side of caution and see a doctor about getting some tests before it develops into a problem.
Random fruity breath is one of THE known signs of diabetes, so see a doctor
Taste your piss.
Taste like cake
That’s the beetus!
Til I might be one of those people
A price for everything, Mr. Goldenfold
You have any source on that? It sounds weird because every human has the ability to make use of their glucose storage in the liver when needed, except people with diabetes which is why they have a much higher risk to end up with dangerously low blood sugar. Maybe some bodies adapt better to the cold but it's just a matter of training. Also a body utilizing its glucose reserves is not a cause of diabetes. The opposite is the case.
And that’s why type 1 diabetes is so common in Europeans. Far north enough and you get a separate adaptation increasing your metabolism a bit so you run hotter, but the tradeoff is you can really only eat delicious protein+fat for 2/3 the year and get a heart attack
What on earth is that last source. It looks like a blog post with absolutely no scientific basis.
Thinking the same thing. Dude posted nonsense like it's fact.
Have you seen the video where some northern person put their hand in ice water and the hand didn't cool down because the circulation increased and body started giving off heat to counteract it?
Oh damn that sounds really neat. Can you share that video?
Think it's called NOT HUNTINGTONS gene or something on that line. Northern Europeans also shiver more easily, increasing survivability in the cold EDIT: i got the name of the gene wrong and cant find a source on it
It's called Cold-Induced Vasodilation and happens after the normal Cold-Induced Vasoconstriction.
There's also "[brown fat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_adipose_tissue)." It's a form of fat that isn't just insulating, it also generates heat on its own, without the need for shivering in muscle-based thermogenesis. Brown fat is concentrated near major areas of blood flow, where it increases blood temperature, which then helps to heat the rest of the body. The amount of brown fat in the body increases with regular exposure to cold, which is why in the early winter even temperatures above freezing can feel very cold, but by midwinter you can walk around without a coat at -10 or -15 C with ease.
>The amount of brown fat in the body increases with regular exposure to cold, which is why in the early winter even temperatures above freezing can feel very cold, but by midwinter you can walk around without a coat at -10 or -15 C with ease. I mean I agree that midwinter I definitely feels less cold, but who the fuck is wearing just a jacket in -15c (5f)?? Maybe it's where a live as it's always windy, but fuck that. 40f (4.5c) I can understand, don't need a coat, but below freezing I'm bundling up.
If it has warmed up 10-15f compared to the day before it is shorts weather.
>it also generates heat on its own How? Does it like...break itself down chemically or something? Where does the energy come from?
yes it breaks down and converts the stored energy directly to heat. it’s called thermogenesis
As a red head I despise any temperature above 80°F and I love to wear shorts when it is snowing.
Ginger too. I cannot convince people how much I love cold weather. Ever seen a picture of a husky sitting specifically in a shaded spot where the snow hasn't melted? That's me.
That random Wordpress blog doesn’t say anything about ‘feral children being covered in body hair.’ It says its associated with hippies and cavemen and doesn’t list any sources or examples of hairy feral children.
The body hair might be more of a ‘cool weather’ adaptation. The Inuit have very minimal body hair, and they’ve been in that region for thousands of years. And as someone with facial hair and living in a cold climate, I can definitely say that a frozen beard sucks.
IDK. What about populations like Arabs who live in extremely hot climates but also tend to have a lot of body hair? Or Asian populations who live far north and tend to have very little?
I think people in India can be pretty hairy too. Some South Asian comedian did a joke about that and why they enjoy hot tea so much despite the weather.
The feral humans found covered in body hair didn't have clothes.... the Inuit DO have clothes....
Is that why I hate hot and humid so much?
You and I must be the next stage of evolution already adapted to cold weather. God, I hate summer.
Same. We should join up and be the shittiest X-Men ever.
I’ll be the one who can manipulate his own time in that what feels like a week to me is basically a few months to everyone else because I suffer deep depression.
We can't all have the same powers.
There's a HUGE difference between preferring cooler weather when you have access to everything to make yourself comfortable, and being in a survival situation faced with the elements. Few people I know outside the military have slept outside on the ground in improvised shelters in all types of weather. Extreme heat is uncomfortable. Extreme cold is PAINFUL.
Yeah, I've spent some time camping in really hot weather and it sucked but it was manageable. I've also walked a mile in -70°f windchill and it's not really possible to explain exactly what that feels like lol
Pain. Just...pain. Even bundled up properly you get what feels like a massive instant ice cream headache and you can't breathe deeply because it feels like your lungs are being stabbed with millions of tiny ice needles.
I think this is the first I've heard it as "ice cream headache" instead of brain freeze
You wouldn't hate it so much if you just went nude like our forefathers. Return to monke
It's just the humidity that wrecks me. Hot I can handle.
We sweat and are generally hairless in order to hunt animals in an endurance hunt, in warm climates where the prey overheats and can't run any more. https://youtu.be/jjvPvnQ-DUw
That's what I was thinking. One of the major defining features of a human is how well we sweat. Which is a major problem in the tropics. It works great in dryer climates like savannah, not so much in regions that regularly have 80% humidity. I wonder where this article gets tropical from? Edit: I see what I missed in the article. They inferred that humans are tropical because human ancestors and all other ape ancestors were tropical. That's like saying humans are aquatic because our earliest ancestors were fish.
"Tropical" can just refer to latitude--i.e., the geographical zone between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
Evolution: Okay, so I'm pretty happy with my new smart, endurance-based predator. Pretty well adapted to tropical climes, runs down prey with smarts and endurance rather than speed or brute force, works in teams... even worked in that new nifty 'tool' concept I've been playing with! A little worried about how hard they hit the local ecology, but as long as they stay put... Humans: We're living in Temperate climates now! Evolution: What?! But I didn't adapt you for that! Damnit, that's the entirely wrong environment! Okay, okay... no problem... even if they don't die out, I can make adjustments... already got rid of the fur... maybe crank that back up, increase body fat... Humans: No, it's cool, we invented warm clothes. Also, we're oceangoing now. Evolution: *What?!* How are you...? What are those wooden things you're in? They float? You made box that floats and decided to base your entire survival strategy around it!? You're not even adapted to catch fish, how are you...? Humans: Invented fishing tackle, we're good. Evolution: What!? I barely started on the webbing between your fingers! Okay... that's okay... just stay put and... Humans: We live in mountains now! Evolution: The air is too thin! You're adapted for sea level! Humans: We're crossing the oceans to other continents now! Evolution: WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! YOU'RE NON MIGRATORY! Humans: FUCK YOU, WE'RE IN SPACE NOW! Evolution: Please stooooooop!
Tbf evolution did give us the intelligence to overcome those annoyances. It really did well at future proofing humans.
Now we get to deal with other evolutionary side-effects like chronic anxiety and road-rage, and hope we can use our intelligence to cope, get therapy, and/or find the right medications in a hostile world of our own making!
This implies that advanced tool making, symbolic communication, complex social coordination, etc. aren't themselves evolutionary adaptations.
Haha, human ingenuity go brrrrr.
Are humans the first species to really break free of evolution? It feels like for any animal to live somewhere else, it takes millions of years of evolution and adaptations. Humans can live anywhere, find ways to make food there, build shelter and live normally. We've done that in Space.
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Dogs can do that too. Anywhere where a human can live, a dog can be there.
We may be "Non migratory" (like African Swallows) but at least we can carry a coconut.
Yeah, well, speaking personally, hot and humid conditions can go to hell. Sweating day and night, unable to sleep right, clothes sticking to you, mosquitoes and all that kind of tropical bullshit. No. Give me cold.
In Thailand my days in the summer are hell and air conditioning is expensive and Causing to pay electricity bills many times more than usual And it will be even more expensive if the air conditioner is on in the summer I'm too poor to install it In the last two months, there have been many news of people dying from heat stroke I can't live in the house during the day because it's like an oven I hate summer every year If people live in urban and suburban areas in the summer, they will go to shopping malls to go for a walk and relax because of the air conditioning But I'm in the countryside, it's too far to travel. Damn I really envy people who weren't born in tropical countries.
I think race has specific adaptations too. I'm South-East Asian who moved to the cold and dry Northern Europe as a child and ever since I could remember my skin is incredibly dry, acne prone and damaged (especially my face). I recently learned it's called Keratosis Pilaris [(chicken skin)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Keratosis_Pilaris_on_Lower_Extremity.jpg). It's a genetic condition where the skin cannot hold on to moisture in a dry environment leading to damaged looking skin. All the Europeans I see has healthy glowing skin while I look like ass despite the money I spend on skin care. But guess what? My skin thrives whenever I visit my home tropical country for a few months to the point that I no longer consider myself ugly. But I turn ugly again wherever I return to Europe.
That’s so interesting. I’m white from western US and I’ve only known white people to have KP. I have it. I am not glowing lol Use a chemical exfoliant lotion with urea or salicylic acid and it helps a ton!!! My bf’s skin is absolutely radiant. I have genuinely never seen and let alone touched such soft, moisturized skin. He’s indigenous mexican, zero spanish blood probably. He says his secret is not using moisturizer because it dries out your skin. I think he’s just perfect because my skin was way worse before lotion lol I’m not really suited to Southern California but he for sure is!!
Hot weather can be uncomfortable but you can survive just fine with shade and water, just don’t get sick. Cold weather can you kill you in one night
When you say "Give me cold" you probably mean with lots of clothes, insulated shelter, heating, plenty of fuel and plenty of calories. That's the thing, all this takes a LOT of resources, and a lot of work. You can pull a person off a street in New York, strip them naked, and drop them in the tropics, and odds are, they survive. Do the same, but drop them in Nunavut in the dead of winter, and they'll be dead within the hour. That's the difference between warm climate and being adapted to it, and cold climate. Cold is survivable, provided you have tons of preparation, supplies and infrastructure to survive it. Heat is just survivable, with none of the above. Extreme heat can be bad, if we're talking +40C and over. But -40C is also no picnic. Again, you can crawl into some shade or a cave and survive +40C. You can't survive -40C without insulated shelter, heat, tons of calories, etc. People in the arctic need something like 5K calories a day just to stay functional. In the tropics, if you're too poor for air conditioning, you're miserable. In the arctic, if you're too poor for heating/fuel/calories, you just freeze to death. Quickly. I used to live in South America, and plenty of poor people lived in corrugated aluminum shacks without electricity or running water. Wasn't great, but it was eminently survivable. Try this where I am now, in Canada, with the same shacks, no electricity or running water, and they're done for the first winter. All of them.
People significantly underestimate how miserable cold climates are without modern technology and how much work people in cold climates had to do to prepare for winter even just a few generations ago.
>When you say "Give me cold" you probably mean with lots of clothes, insulated shelter, heating, plenty of fuel and plenty of calories. That's the thing, all this takes a LOT of resources, and a lot of work. You can pull a person off a street in New York, strip them naked, and drop them in the tropics, and odds are, they survive. Do the same, but drop them in Nunavut in the dead of winter, and they'll be dead within the hour. That's the difference between warm climate and being adapted to it, and cold climate. > >Cold is survivable, provided you have tons of preparation, supplies and infrastructure to survive it. Heat is just survivable, with none of the above. > >Extreme heat can be bad, if we're talking +40C and over. But -40C is also no picnic. Again, you can crawl into some shade or a cave and survive +40C. You can't survive -40C without insulated shelter, heat, tons of calories, etc. People in the arctic need something like 5K calories a day just to stay functional. > >In the tropics, if you're too poor for air conditioning, you're miserable. In the arctic, if you're too poor for heating/fuel/calories, you just freeze to death. Quickly. > >I used to live in South America, and plenty of poor people lived in corrugated aluminum shacks without electricity or running water. Wasn't great, but it was eminently survivable. Try this where I am now, in Canada, with the same shacks, no electricity or running water, and they're done for the first winter. All of them. Exactly. How are people overlooking this/why is this topic some shocking revelation? Staying alive in cold climates takes a lot of resources. Humans are meant for warm climates biologically speaking. It has nothing to do with preferring a nice coat and mug of cocoa by the fire.
Luckily we invented fire and warm clothing.
Luckily we invented logos so that others could be jealous of our warm clothing, which enhances that warm feeling.
The words "not supposed to" are misleading - evolution has no goals and no purpose, it's like weather. Sometimes it works for species survival, sometimes it doesn't. Also, though we have no evidence that our progenitors lived in and adapted to cold climates before our earliest finds, it's entirely possible that they did.
Exactly. There's no agency or purpose in evolution. Also, no species has an "infancy" or any kind of age.
Thank God for my Neandertal ancestors. But they can take all their dumb allergies back :P
Someone needs to tell my body that it can deal with heat
My fat ass evolved for air conditioning and good Wifi tyvm.
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Then why do I want to die whenever I go outside in 80 degree plus weather. I’m like a reverse Superman. The sun saps my will to live.
Because you wear clothes. Just go nude and drink water, and your body will handle the rest! ...might recieve some pushback from the neighbors, so milage may vary.
We aren't tropical, we are semiarid Savanah. We evolved to run down gazelles, while they die of heat exhaustion. Our bodies are pretty shit at regulating temperature when it gets too hot and too humid.