What Doesn't Kill Us

by Scott Carney

Above the Arctic Circle in the Norwegian territory of Lapland, one scientist found that the local reindeer herders had an incredibly strong vasoconstriction response to the cold while at the same time exhibited a pronounced drop in their core temperatures when they slept out in the snow at night. The Lapps, it seems, had discovered a way to simply not be bothered too much by getting cold, and had a much higher threshold before succumbing to hypothermia. But the strategy for surviving the Arctic climate was found not to be the same across all polar-dwelling populations. Inuit subjects who lived in northern Canada showed significant heat loss when given the same test, leading researchers to suspect that they were instead able to passively increase their metabolism. Inuit were also able to keep their hands warm when immersed in cold water, which means they had a blunted vasoconstriction response. This adaptation strategy would have meant that their bodies intentionally sacrificed some of their core temperature in order to have better dexterity with their hands. An anthropologist named H. T. Hammel who studied Aborigines of the central Australian desert in the 1950s observed that even though the tribesmen wore no clothing, they still slept outside throughout the winter when the temperature dropped to just below freezing at night. They slept on bare ground with only a screen of bushes to protect them from the howling winds. While they were asleep, Hammel tested the Aborigines’ ...