KEEPING WARM 
Eskimos Are Warm People 
Their vision of hell is that of a cold place, 
and they have no intention of living it on Earth 
Text and photographs by Fred Bruemmer 
Since man originated in a warm cli- 
mate, presumably Africa, this furless 
relative of the apes was poorly designed 
by nature to cope with cold. Naked 
humans today are comfortable at an 
ambient air temperature of about 75 °F. 
At temperatures lower than this, we 
begin to feel chilly and respond by shiv- 
ering, which roughly triples the body’s 
heat production, and by having goose 
pimples, a pathetic vestigial attempt to 
fluff out the protective fur our forebears 
had. When the air temperature is low 
enough to sap body heat faster than it 
can be generated, the body’s core tem- 
perature is lowered, and we are immedi- 
ately in grave trouble. Our normal body 
temperature is 98.6°. At 91°, our ther- 
moregulatory system begins to falter. 
According to David E. Bass of the 
U.S. Army Research Institute of Envi- 
ronmental Medicine, “Man becomes in- 
capable of conscious, lifesaving deci- 
sions when deep body temperature is 
lowered by only seven degrees. Further- 
more, long before this point is reached, 
he has become subjectively so uncom- 
fortable that he must spend 100 percent 
of his effort toward mere survival.” A 
naked human exposed to —40° tempera- 
ture and winds of thirty miles per 
hour — conditions common in the Arc- 
tic — would die in about fifteen minutes. 
Given this hereditary sensitivity to 
cold, it is not surprising that the ancients 
living in southern climes contemplated 
the north with dread and loathing. In 
430 b.c., the Greek historian Herodotus 
wrote about the northern regions of Eu- 
On the Belcher Islands in Hudson 
Bay, the Eskimos made parkas from 
the skins of eider ducks when 
caribou were not available. Eider 
parkas were light and warm, but 
more fragile than those of caribou fur. 
rope: “The whole of the country . . . has 
so hard and severe a winter, that there 
prevails there for eight months an alto- 
gether unsupportable cold.” 
Yet people did live in the north of 
Europe. And at the same time, precur- 
sors of the modern Eskimos inhabited 
the much harsher North American Arc- 
tic, from Alaska to East Greenland and 
north to the very limit of land, on Elles- 
mere Island and in Peary Land. Today, 
in these regions, the mean January tem- 
perature is —30°, temperatures can 
drop to nearly -70°, winter storms are 
frequent, and the sun sets on October 20 
and does not rise above the horizon 
again until early March. In the Thule 
region of northwest Greenland, home of 
the Polar Eskimos, only one month, 
July, has an average temperature above 
the freezing point. Yet contemporary 
Eskimos call this region Nunassiaq , 
“the beautiful land.” 
This may seem a strange description 
of the harshest, most hostile, and poten- 
tially most lethal environment ever in- 
habited by humans. But the prehistoric 
Eskimos, who knew only their land, did 
not think of it as being extraordinarily 
harsh or hostile. To them it was simply 
nunavut , their homeland, and until mis- 
sionaries and explorers told them other- 
wise, they believed it to be the best of all 
possible worlds, a land and a sea rich in 
game. Nor did they necessarily find 
other lands and other climes more genial 
and alluring. In 1851, after a fruitless 
search for the missing Franklin expedi- 
tion (whose 129 officers and crew all 
perished on their ill-fated search for the 
Northwest Passage), Capt. Erasmus 
Ommanney returned to England, taking 
with him Kallihiruas, a young Polar 
Eskimo from northwest Greenland. Kal- 
lihiruas lived for four years in Canter- 
bury and, dressed in European clothes, 
was pitifully cold. In 1855, he wrote a 
plaintive letter to an English friend: “I 
been in England long time, none very 
well. Very bad weather. ... I very sorry, 
very bad weather dreadful. Country 
very different. Another day cold. An- 
other day wet. I miserable. . . .” 
For a people whose ancestors have 
lived in the far north for at least 10,000 
years, the Eskimos have few physiologi- 
cal adaptations to the severity of the 
climate. They can digest and assimilate 
fat better than Europeans. Their basal 
metabolic rate is 20 to 40 percent higher 
than that of people in more southerly 
regions. Their hands and feet are small, 
and in cold conditions, the blood flow to 
the extremities is more intense than in 
most other human groups. Vasodilation 
(the widening of blood vessels) permits 
abundant blood flow to the hands, and 
as a result, Eskimos have warm hands 
even in cold weather. 
But while such physiological adapta- 
tions help protect hands and feet and, 
equally important for a hunting people, 
insure manual dexterity even in very 
cold weather, they are only minor com- 
ponents of the Eskimos’ survival kit. To 
protect themselves from the lethal cold 
of the arctic climate, the Eskimos’ fore- 
bears invented, in the words of the ex- 
plorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, “a system 
of living perfectly adapted to a cold 
climate. . . .” It took millenniums to at- 
tain this perfection. 
Just when and where the Eskimos 
originated, and why they chose the Arc- 
tic as their home, are subjects of conjec- 
ture. People of Arctic Mongoloid stock 
probably came from Siberia across the 
Bering Strait to Alaska about 10,000 
years ago, at a time when the ancestors 
of the Indians had already preempted 
most of North America except the Arc- 
tic. Some specialists think that these 
people are ancestral to both Eskimos 
and Aleuts and call them Eskaleuts. 
For a hunting people, the Arctic had 
its attractions: millions of caribou, tens 
of thousands of musk oxen, millions of 
birds and seals, and plentiful whales and 
walruses. But for the first humans to 
colonize this game-rich but climatically 
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