Here in Northern/Central Europe, the idea of hibernating, or at least sleeping for 15+ hours a day, is pretty appealing during the winter. The number of daylight hours is very small and the weather in general is unpleasant. My assumption is that a few thousand years ago, prior to reliable widespread artificial light, people slept a lot more.
umeshunni 314 days ago [-]
Could that have been the case a few hundred year ago as well? Artificial light, even candles and oil/wood, was fairly expensive till 200 or so years ago.
keiferski 314 days ago [-]
Probably true as well, although I wonder if the more widespread agriculture and crafts meant that people just stayed inside in semi-darkness working instead of sleeping.
pedalpete 314 days ago [-]
Very interesting. We're in the neuro/sleep/health space, so hibernation is an area of interest to me.
What I think wasn't addressed in this article is how a lack of physical activity may affect a human body, or how animals that do hibernate adapt to a loss of muscle mass.
Most animals are stronger by weight than humans, so perhaps this isn't as much of an issue for them.
piva00 314 days ago [-]
> Most animals are stronger by weight than humans, so perhaps this isn't as much of an issue for them.
As far as I know, most animals don't have to train to gain muscle mass, they just have it from their nutrition, losing muscle mass is a last resort of their bodies to consume calories during starvation but they will gain that muscle mass back if fed properly. Not so much with humans, we need to constantly use our muscles to signal our bodies they're needed, as an adaptation if those aren't needed we will not be carrying extra muscle mass around.
I might be wrong since the last I read about this was many years ago but it's how I remember it from studies of great apes, big cats, etc.
jauco 314 days ago [-]
That's an interesting thing that I never thought about!
What I think wasn't addressed in this article is how a lack of physical activity may affect a human body, or how animals that do hibernate adapt to a loss of muscle mass.
Most animals are stronger by weight than humans, so perhaps this isn't as much of an issue for them.
As far as I know, most animals don't have to train to gain muscle mass, they just have it from their nutrition, losing muscle mass is a last resort of their bodies to consume calories during starvation but they will gain that muscle mass back if fed properly. Not so much with humans, we need to constantly use our muscles to signal our bodies they're needed, as an adaptation if those aren't needed we will not be carrying extra muscle mass around.
I might be wrong since the last I read about this was many years ago but it's how I remember it from studies of great apes, big cats, etc.
Did a quick google. This stackexchange answer has some interesting points: https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/98207/do-animal-...