How Did Ancient Humans Survive Without Blankets?

One of your feet came out from under the blanket last night. You did not wake up - something in you noticed anyway and pulled it back in. That blanket is newer than almost everything about you. For roughly ninety-nine percent of the time there have been humans, not one human owned one. So how did they get through the night? You go through one freezing ancestral night from the first drop in temperature to sunrise. You find out what cold actually does to a body, and why you cannot fall asleep while you are shivering. You learn why a fire is a bad blanket, who in the camp had to stay half awake to feed it, and why nobody in the history of your species ever slept alone until extremely recently. You find out how lice - of all things - are used to date the invention of clothing, and why the oldest sewing needle is far younger than you would guess. Then you reach the thing that was in your ancestor's bed and has never once been in yours. Not fur. Not fire. A two-hundred-thousand-year-old bed found at the back of a South African cave, built in deliberate layers, with ash underneath it and the leaves of one specific tree laid on top. They were not only keeping the heat in. They were keeping the night out. And you find out about the heating system you were born with, still sitting across your upper back, that your thermostat quietly switched off. If this changed how you look at your own bed, hit like, subscribe for a new Ancient Humans episode, and tell me in the comments the coldest night you have ever slept through. RESEARCH AND SOURCES: Lyn Wadley et al., "Fire and grass-bedding construction 200 thousand years ago at Border Cave, South Africa", Science 369 (2020), 863-866. doi:10.1126/science.abc7239 - broad-leafed grass bedding laid on ash layers, the ash apparently used to deter ticks and other crawling insects. Lyn Wadley et al., "Middle Stone Age Bedding Construction and Settlement Patterns at Sibudu, South Africa", Science 334 (2011), 1388-1391. doi:10.1126/science.1213317 - sedge bedding around 77,000 years old topped with leaves of Cryptocarya woodii, the river wild-quince, whose crushed leaves are insecticidal. Francesco Berna et al., "Microstratigraphic evidence of in situ fire in the Acheulean strata of Wonderwerk Cave, Northern Cape province, South Africa", PNAS 109 (2012). doi:10.1073/pnas.1117620109 - ash and burnt bone in a cave interior around one million years old. Ralf Kittler, Manfred Kayser and Mark Stoneking, "Molecular Evolution of Pediculus humanus and the Origin of Clothing", Current Biology 13 (2003) - dating the invention of clothing from the split between head lice and clothing lice. Melissa Toups et al., "Origin of Clothing Lice Indicates Early Clothing Use by Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa", Molecular Biology and Evolution 28 (2011) - a later estimate in the 83,000 to 170,000 year range. Wouter van Marken Lichtenbelt et al., "Cold-Activated Brown Adipose Tissue in Healthy Men", New England Journal of Medicine 360 (2009) - brown adipose tissue switching on in the upper back and neck under mild cold. Gandhi Yetish et al., "Natural Sleep and Its Seasonal Variations in Three Pre-industrial Societies", Current Biology 25 (2015). doi:10.1016/j.cub.2015.09.046 - sleep onset in foraging societies tracking the fall in ambient temperature. The Ötztal Iceman ("Ötzi"), found in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps, died around 5,300 years ago. His surviving kit includes a stitched goat-hide coat and leggings, a bear-fur cap with a chin strap, shoes with a bearskin sole and a woven interior net packed with dry grass, and an outer cloak of woven grass. South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, Bolzano. #ancienthumans #huntergatherer #prehistory #humanevolution #anthropology #stoneage #archaeology #earlyhumans #survival #cold #sleep #bordercave #sibudu #otzi #iceman #brownfat #firemaking #humanorigins #scienceexplained #doodle #explainer #curiosity