Remove the average American from his thermostatically controlled home and office and insulated underwear and what will become of him? Of course, no one can make a blanket prediction, but the fact remains that whenever so-called civilized people journey from their artificial environment, they are immediately “out of sync” with their surroundings.

Too often, reference to “the elements” is negative. The elements are not an enemy to be reckoned with, the elements are our natural surroundings. Yet many people are so far removed from the unaffected environment, they no longer know the meaning of natural as it relates to the human experience. Thus, their greatest concern often becomes how to protect themselves from nature, rather than to unite and co-exist with it. But once we understand our relationship to our natural surroundings, and our own limitations, we can live almost anywhere, from the frozen Arctic to the Sahara.

But it is not reasonable to assume that a person, simply because he or she has the skill necessary to live in a particular environment, can do so without some preparation. I’ve had students look around the classroom and say, “O . K., if we were stranded here for a week, how would we survive?”

“Well,” I tell them, “we could certainly stay warm and dry, but we’d be very hungry and thirsty by the end of the experiment.”

By the same token, a person caught unprepared in sub-zero temperatures in a tee shirt, sandals and shorts would likely die from exposure before he had a chance to protect himself, even if he knew how to find shelter.

More often than not, it is stupid mistakes, not Mother Nature that causes people to die from exposure. She is not cruel; we are often simply neophytes when it comes to existing in her realm. We should recognize and respect the irony of Mother Nature’s law—she provides the supplies to build a shelter, but she holds the awesome power to bring it down.

What it really takes to live comfortably in any weather and terrain is a lot of study into what has worked before, what can be learned from modern research and technology, combined with basic “abo” logic. Stir that information up in your brain and you will be better prepared to live with the elements than any generation since humans first left their caves.

Ice Age Adaptability

Before the advent of man-made fibers, people pretty much had to rely on their imagination and what was available to them to keep warm. In fact, it was not unusual for a chilly Neanderthal to settle down for the night under the stars in a pile of dry leaves. This crude method of insulation did not last long, however, before man decided to turn over a new leaf.

If you say “Neanderthal” to friends and ask for their first association, you’ll probably get “cave-man.” While most excavated Neanderthal remains do come from caves, that’s because open-air sites would be eroded much more quickly. Neanderthals must have constructed some type of shelter against the cold climate in which they lived, but those shelters must have been crude. All that remain are post-holes and a few piles of stones.

But we know that the Ice Age hunter became pretty good at adapting to his weather-driven life because he survived three 100,000 year periods of freezing and warming. Life was obviously hard and most people died young. It is estimated at least half the Neanderthal population perished in childhood, and less than 5% lived past the age of 40, partly due to exposure.

Cave-dwelling Paleolithic people were often desperately hungry. Because of the blizzards outside their caves, they were forced to hunt within them. And there, by a stroke of luck they found just what they needed—a big hibernating beast whose meat and fat were delicious and whose pelt made the best kind of cold-weather garment. This animal, now extinct, was the cave bear, which weighed over 1,000 pounds at maturity. Cave bears were so prolific in the Austrian Alps that the bones of 50,000 of them were found in a single cave.

So animal pelts and fur replaced leaves and became all the rage in insulated apparel. Entire families were outfitted in this newest line of outerwear. And, although this was somewhat more sophisticated than foliage insulation, the cold still got under their skins.

Around 75,000 B.C. when the fourth glacial advances refrigerated Europe, man stayed in the north and developed new skills simply through the effort to keep warm.

The human economy of the Old Stone Age was based entirely on hunting, which not only gave man his food but provided raw materials, such as hide, sinew and bone. During the winter, large-scale mammoth hunts were organized in what is now Russia and other parts of the north. After the mammoths were eaten, their bones were used to make tools and weapons and their tusks were used to anchor the skin coverings of dwellings dug out of the frozen ground. Undoubtedly, one wooly mammoth, the largest land-dwelling animal that man has ever encountered, would have provided warm protection against the cold for a number of people.

By 35,000-28,000 B.C. descendants of Neanderthals had special tools for dressing animal skins and had figured out how to increase the effectiveness of skin-and-fur insulation by lacing their clothes together with thongs. (It took another 14,000 years to develop the first bone needles with eyes which equipped women to stitch leather clothing.)

The Big Melt-down

Then, about 20,000 years ago, Europe became gradually warmer and man emerged from the protection of his caves and began a life in the open. Late Cro-Magnon clans built dwellings from wood, stone, bone or skins or lived in natural rock shelters and spent much of the year in cozy base camps, complete with hearths and cobblestone floors which provided insulation in the winter. And, in an ingenious piece of interior design, they heated the cobblestones before placing them on the frozen mud. The stones melted the hard ground, settled in snugly and made sturdy, dry floors.

They also established seasonal camps-the Paleolithic equivalent of summer condos. Built on rises, these shelters provided a good view of migrating herds. Seventy-five percent of the sites were found to face south, indicating that the builders took advantage of solar heat. Nothing has really changed, has it? Even in our own time, southern exposure adds value to a home.

This less sedentary lifestyle required temporary shelter that could be moved or abandoned and rebuilt as the people followed the herds.

Prehistoric sheep with dark hairy coats that caught on branches or simply fell off their bodies in heavy clumps every spring also roamed Europe. It is likely that early people took advantage of the matted wool for warmth, but this is only speculation since wool, like other natural fibers, is biodegradable and rarely part of archaeological finds.

Man almost certainly discovered the food value of sheep first, but when he began to fashion garments to protect his body from hot or freezing temperatures, he learned that sheep could be worth more alive than dead.

About 12,000 years ago, when man realized that with sheep he could roam and prosper on the windswept mountains and plains, a cooperative relationship developed-man protected the sheep from predators, sheep provided man with food and clothing. Wool clothing also allowed nomadic tribes to expand into extremes of terrain and climate. The Bedouin still use wool for their tents and wear wool clothing as insulation in the desert.

“Felting” compacts wool, making it less permeable, warmer, studier, and more water resistant. Magdalenian shepherds probably stumbled onto felt when they put loose wool in their sandals for comfort on a long journey and the moisture, movement, and warmth transformed the wool into felt. In fact, wool was so popular in the lives of Asian nomads that in the fourth century B.C. the Chinese called their territory “the land of felt.” Man, whose body is least suited of all the animals to live in inhospitable climates, has made use of the natural material ever since.