The researchers created exact replicas of the ancient skates, adding only a safer binding. They then persuaded five retired professional skaters to test the skates at an ice rink in the Italian Alps. The researchers measured the skaters' heart rates, oxygen intake and skating speeds, and the results were fed into computer simulations to determine how much energy our ancestors would have saved using skates during each of 240 six-mile journeys in different parts of northern Europe. It emerged that while the energy saving was only 3 percent in Norway, and 1 percent or less in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, skating across Finland's lakes would save 10 percent of people's energy. The researchers believe that in Finland, the strong presence of lakes of irregular shape could force humans to develop ice skates in order to limit the energy cost of traveling. "Ice skates in Finland were a huge benefit. Our study does not provide conclusive evidence that ice skating originated in that country, but poses strong basis for this hypothesis. In other words, if I were an archaeologist searching for the oldest ice skates, I would certainly start from Finland," Formenti said. Steven Vogel, professor of Biology at Duke University, and the author of "Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle," agrees. These are "defensible but damnably hard-to-prove ideas," he said. "That's the problem with such a subject. I have to applaud Alberto Minetti and his collaborators for doing what almost no one else does, applying what is our present understanding of these areas of science to human history and prehistory." Related Links: |
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