If you live in, or have visited, a cold country, you’ll know how much of a struggle it can seem to keep warm.

But really, in the modern era, we’re lucky. We have thick winter clothing, insulation, underfloor and central heating, plush duvets – and, of course, hot cocoa.

Regardless, if we got stuck outside in the snow without any of these for too long, we almost certainly wouldn’t survive.

Which brings us to the Neanderthals, and how exactly they managed to survive the Ice Age all those years before insulated gloves and heated car seats.

According to a recent study published in the American Journal of Human Biology, the adaptations made by Neanderthals living during the Ice Age were as numerous as they were effective.

And many of those adaptations are, surprisingly, similar to the things that we do to keep warm: wrap up warm and turn on the heating.

Of course, the Neanderthals couldn’t pull on thermal trousers and an insulated coat. Instead, they wore thick and cosy animal hides (clever really, when you consider that these were what were previously keeping an adapted animal warm), with bone needles recovered from Siberian sites evidence that they tailored their clothing for maximum warming effect.

Neither could they press a simple button on a thermostat to be blasted with heat. Instead, Neanderthals had to master one of Earth’s great elements: fire. Campfires are thought to have been built at Neanderthal camps, with plenty of evidence to suggest that they even understood that oxygen was needed for an effective fire.

More than this though, the research team suggest that Neanderthals were biologically adapted to tolerate the cold much better than we, the modern humans who have inherited their world.

Incredibly, Neanderthals were thought to have generated plenty of heat themselves in a way that we are unable to do. That’s because they had a much higher basal metabolic rate than us, as well as accumulations of brown adipose tissue, which for humans is only present in babies.

Why is this important? Well, because this fat can produce its own heat when it’s extremely cold, meaning that in bitter temperatures, Neanderthals were significantly more adept than we are at warming themselves up.

Those of us who spend months of the year wrapped in blankets could only imagine.

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