[thedoc]

Bedding 77,000 years old has been uncovered at a cave site in South Africa....

Read the whole story on our website by clicking here

  

[Bored chemist]

Bedrock of course.

[CliffordK]

Interesting.

They may have chosen to keep green boughs for the mattress, which would mean periodically harvesting new ones, and what better place to put the old boughs than in the fire.

It would seem that there would also be some kind of blankets such as evidence of animal furs and leather.  However, perhaps it would not be necessary in South Africa.

[Geezer]

Bedrock of course.

No, well, see, Fred and Wilma actually lived in Bedrock City.

[Bored chemist]

Bedrock of course.

No, well, see, Fred and Wilma actually lived in Bedrock City.

Close, they were from the "Town of Bedrock" according to the theme song.
But that's not the point. Plenty of people live in the towns of Slumberland and Silentnight.

[SeanB]

I live near the site, it can get cold in winter, enough that you will want some sort of blanket, either dry grasses or hides.

[CZARCAR]

what if Wilma was so fat she couldnt rise & Fred kept feeding her cause he loved her so............from the beginnings

[Don_1]

It certainly seems reasonable that our ancestors would have the need for bedding. A cave floor is far from a comfortable place to sleep without some sort of cushioning and insulation against a hard cold surface. Not that I speak from experience, I hasten to add.

Reuse of the same bedding, over time would render the materials unfit for purpose. As they dry out, so they would become less insulating and uncomfortable and, as Professor Lyn Wadley suggests, the bedding would also become infested.

So, if a group, say 10 individuals, were gathering fresh bedding regularly, might this be an additional reason for our prehistoric ancestors to have been nomadic? After a period of time, and a lot of fresh bedding, even a small group might devastate the near by fauna. This could be an additional factor in the need to move on to where there was ample supply of fresh bedding, rather than travel over long distances to gather their requirements and carry it back to the cave.

Of course there are factors which might make the use of fresh bedding undesirable. Fresh grasses, moss, sedge and other leaves would contain a higher water levels than those which had been used a few times, making the fresh bed damp. Not only more attractive to potential parasites, but also to fungal growth, which could have an effect on the sleepers airway. Also, sleeping on a damp bed is not such a good idea. Perhaps a contributory factor in our ancestor’s short lifespan.

The cold and perhaps damp nature of a cave floor would seem to me to have been quite a draw back to sleeping in caves, but the protection from rain and predators might well have out weighed the draw backs. Having discovered that leaf matter offered some solution to the problems, how long might it have been before raising the bed from the cave floor on a wooden platform supported by legs (a prehistoric 'bedstead') might have become normal practice? And, how long might that 'bedstead' have been used before it, along with the bedding, was destroyed and replaced?

[Nizzle]

77.000 year old beds are very futuristic from Fred'n'Wilma's point of view