[SunkenCiv]

Shorter and rounder holds the heat better, generally speaking (less surface area per unit volume). The Neandertal forebears of us Europeans had longer torsos, which is a characteristic of Lapps (for example). One reason women last longer in freezing water (other than overall height) is proportionately longer torsos. The Little Ice Age kicked in during the early 13th century. It began with nasty, colder, rainy springs that wrecked planting, and led to massive starvation in Europe. During the medieval warming agriculture spread to higher altitudes and latitudes than is possible today, and ocean levels rose (unlike today).

The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 by Brian M. Fagan Paperback	Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations by Brian M. Fagan	The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization by Brian M. Fagan

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[SunkenCiv]

Oops, sorry, I meant "early 14th century." [blush] The cooling began earlier, the starvation began in 1315. A hundred years earlier [the leftmost title, beginning p 29] early frosts and crop failures led to severe starvation in Poland and Russia; later in the 13th (not 14th) century "Alpine glaciers advanced for the first time in centuries" and there were frozen rivers during the winters for the first time in (probably) centuries.

Between 1350 and 1380, in Iceland, "sea ice came so close to land that Greenland polar bears came ashore." [p 9]