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The Younger Dryas was Earth’s last ice age, which began around 12,000 years ago and lasted around 1,000 years. Its onset only took a decade. By that point, humans had started to migrate out of Africa and into Europe, and so when temperatures dropped an average of 30 degrees, many people starved or froze to death. Moalem posits that those with diabetes who lived in these northern places were able to better survive the Younger Dryas because the high sugar content in their blood acted as a kind of natural antifreeze.
Younger Dryas Quotes in Survival of the Sickest
The Survival of the Sickest quotes below are all either spoken by Younger Dryas or refer to Younger Dryas. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 2
Quotes
The Younger Dryas had arrived, and the world was changed.
Though humanity would survive, the short-term impact, especially for those populations that had moved north, was devastating. In less than a generation, virtually every learned method of survival—from the shelters they built to the hunting they practiced—was inadequate.
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But what if a temporary diabetes-like condition occurred in a person who had significant brown fat living in an ice age environment? Food would probably be limited, so dietary blood-sugar load would already be low, and brown fat would convert most of that to heat, so the ice age “diabetic’s” blood sugar, even with less insulin, might never reach dangerous levels. Modern-day diabetics, on the other hand, with little or no brown fat, and little or no expo- sure to constant cold, have no use—and thus no outlet—for the sugar that accumulates in their blood.
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Younger Dryas Term Timeline in Survival of the Sickest
The timeline below shows where the term Younger Dryas appears in Survival of the Sickest. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2: A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Temperature Go Down
...Europe 12,000 years ago. This provided evidence for an ice age, which they named the Younger Dryas . By the 1950s and 60s, more evidence was discovered by boring into two-mile cores...
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Just before the Younger Dryas , human migration had begun as people moved out of Africa and north into areas...
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...in Northern Europe. Any adaptation to manage the cold during the sudden onset of the Younger Dryas , he notes, would have been advantageous. Moalem also argues that they could have developed...
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