Considering the freezing temps we record annually coupled with tornadoes and other natural phenomena, how did ancient people survive the adverse weather without modern housing, clothing and heating technologies we have today. I’m taking 500+ years ago.
In: 178
Well, one, there’s a LOT of room between *ancient* people and *before modern housing* people. But both had fire.
Pre-modern civilizations built houses and had fires in them. The hearth – where the fire is held – is a very important symbol in most cultures, in part for this reason (and in part for its significance in cooking). In the West, this is usually a fireplace with a chimney, and other regions of the world have their own variants (like the Japanese [irori](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irori)). Civilizations that didn’t build permanent houses, like the nomadic Sioux Indians of what is now the United States, used insulated tents with a vent ([tipis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipi), in the context of the Sioux) and built fires inside them.
Fire has been around for as long as modern humans have, and it predates the human spread beyond Africa and into colder regions, so we’ve never really lived in cold places without it. Ancient peoples built campfires and temporary shelters, but like a lot of ancient life, dying was a very real possibility – they just didn’t die enough for the civilizations to die out.
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