HOME | DD

Description
Spain - 450,000 years ago.

Deep in the caverns of the Atapuerca mountains, Deninger's cave bear (Ursus deningeri) searches for a place to rest for the winter.
He lumbers through the dark nether, but as he closes in, he catches a strange scent.

Unlikely neighbours - a family of Neanderthals, have sought shelter here. They use animal hides as bedding, but this is no ordinary sleep. These people will lay dormant for months on end, stirring intermittently, until the season improves. In better times they would forage out among the mountains and valleys, but the unforgiving Elsterian winter has stripped their land of sufficient food to stay active. Instead they conserve energy in a hibernation-like state, not unlike their ursine "friend", until conditions improve.
Nonetheless, as primates they are not well-suited to hibernation, and this slumber will take its toll on their bodies. Starvation, rickets, stunted growth, kidney disease and other conditions are incurred by hibernating for this long. Adults may recover in the spring, but the adolescents are especially vulnerable to passing, their still-growing bodies can give out under the strains of hibernation.

Let's hope they're content to lay with the bear.....

Science:

A few days ago a new paper came out in the French Anthropology journal.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/…
It was posted to PeerJ in 2018, but now it has been peer-reviewed. peerj.com/preprints/27370.pdf

The paper looked at the 29 hominins found at Sima de los Huesos in Spain (450kya), probably very early Neanderthals from DNA evidence.
Based on age profile, bone histology and comparisons to other hibernating mammals, they conclude that the Sima people show signs of hibernation (stunted growth, rickets, other bone conditions). Here they suggest intermittent hibernation, waking up maybe once monthly with a total slumber of at least 4 months.
Pathologies are exacerbated in adolescents, which are overrepresented at Sima (85.7%), supporting hibernation mortality, as adolescents are still growing, putting additional metabolic strains on them. Consequently, they show fewer signs of healing.
The authors also bring up human cases where certain populations have been known to undergo prolonged periods of sleep, and the underlying mechanisms. Likewise comparisons are drawn with other hibernators, including the cave bears with whom hominins shared their world.

Sima people lived during the most severe glaciation of the last 1myr. ~450kya was MIS 12, or the Elsterian/Anglian glaciation, which was much more severe than the Weichselian of the late Pleistocene. As a result the environment in norther Spain was a harsh semi-desert. The Sima people, they argue, lacked sufficient food in winter and thus had to sleep for long periods of time, but this was not well tolerated.
Later Neanderthals were more derived and better-adapted to cold winters (which were not as severe as the Elsterian), thus may have lost the need to hibernate. So this hibernation conclusion only pertains to early Neanderthals in certain ecological circumstances.

Don't get me wrong, I'm quite skeptical of this conclusion, but the authors lay out their case. I'm not an expert in bone histology, so perhaps they do have a point with the kidney disease, rickets etc. suggested from the Sima remains. I'll just have to wait until this gets talked about among academic circles (replies, citations, etc.).

But it was nonetheless an interesting idea I had to draw.

Description
Spain - 450,000 years ago.

Deep in the caverns of the Atapuerca mountains, Deninger's cave bear (Ursus deningeri) searches for a place to rest for the winter.
He lumbers through the dark nether, but as he closes in, he catches a strange scent.

Unlikely neighbours - a family of Neanderthals, have sought shelter here. They use animal hides as bedding, but this is no ordinary sleep. These people will lay dormant for months on end, stirring intermittently, until the season improves. In better times they would forage out among the mountains and valleys, but the unforgiving Elsterian winter has stripped their land of sufficient food to stay active. Instead they conserve energy in a hibernation-like state, not unlike their ursine "friend", until conditions improve.
Nonetheless, as primates they are not well-suited to hibernation, and this slumber will take its toll on their bodies. Starvation, rickets, stunted growth, kidney disease and other conditions are incurred by hibernating for this long. Adults may recover in the spring, but the adolescents are especially vulnerable to passing, their still-growing bodies can give out under the strains of hibernation.

Let's hope they're content to lay with the bear.....

Science:

A few days ago a new paper came out in the French Anthropology journal.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/…
It was posted to PeerJ in 2018, but now it has been peer-reviewed. peerj.com/preprints/27370.pdf

The paper looked at the 29 hominins found at Sima de los Huesos in Spain (450kya), probably very early Neanderthals from DNA evidence.
Based on age profile, bone histology and comparisons to other hibernating mammals, they conclude that the Sima people show signs of hibernation (stunted growth, rickets, other bone conditions). Here they suggest intermittent hibernation, waking up maybe once monthly with a total slumber of at least 4 months.
Pathologies are exacerbated in adolescents, which are overrepresented at Sima (85.7%), supporting hibernation mortality, as adolescents are still growing, putting additional metabolic strains on them. Consequently, they show fewer signs of healing.
The authors also bring up human cases where certain populations have been known to undergo prolonged periods of sleep, and the underlying mechanisms. Likewise comparisons are drawn with other hibernators, including the cave bears with whom hominins shared their world.

Sima people lived during the most severe glaciation of the last 1myr. ~450kya was MIS 12, or the Elsterian/Anglian glaciation, which was much more severe than the Weichselian of the late Pleistocene. As a result the environment in norther Spain was a harsh semi-desert. The Sima people, they argue, lacked sufficient food in winter and thus had to sleep for long periods of time, but this was not well tolerated.
Later Neanderthals were more derived and better-adapted to cold winters (which were not as severe as the Elsterian), thus may have lost the need to hibernate. So this hibernation conclusion only pertains to early Neanderthals in certain ecological circumstances.

Don't get me wrong, I'm quite skeptical of this conclusion, but the authors lay out their case. I'm not an expert in bone histology, so perhaps they do have a point with the kidney disease, rickets etc. suggested from the Sima remains. I'll just have to wait until this gets talked about among academic circles (replies, citations, etc.).

But it was nonetheless an interesting idea I had to draw.