Survival: life in extreme conditions

Man has always lived dangerously, ever since his most distant ancestor, a hominid who probably lived on the African continent, took the first steps along the path of human evolution and discovered that a stone held in the hand could be used as a tool or a weapon.

From the dawn of history onwards, human beings continually courted danger as the struggle for survival schooled them in resourcefulness and impelled them to the limits of endurance. This determination to perform seemingly impossible feats is a thread which runs through the pattern of human destiny and helps to explain the extraordinary efforts made by human communities in various parts of the world to adapt to extremely rigorous environmental conditions. From the primitive hunters who confronted their prey armed only with a stone axe, to the space travellers of the late twentieth century who must reach peak physical and mental condition in order to spend long periods in a state ofweightlessness, human beings have always shown capacities for adaptation both to the natural environment and to their self-imposed challenges. Man is by nature an inventive, forward-looking being whose relentless drive to master himself and the world around him is so strong that today some fear that it may even lead him along the road to destruction.

This issue of The UNESCO Courier looks at the processes ofhuman adaptation and endurance as they are revealed in a number of extreme and potentially dangerous situations. A medical doctor describes his gruelling experiences during a solo expedition to the North Pole on skis, while another scientist presents some of the findings of his extraordinary experiments in long-term confinement underground, cut offfrom the rhythms of the solar day. Other articles examine the ways in which space voyagers deal with weightlessness; the mechanisms of adjustment to high altitudes; adaptation to conditions in deserts and tropical forests, to life on and under the sea, and to the wear and tear of everyday existence in the modern world. Finally we evoke the phenomenal exploits of a Norwegian long-distance runner who a century and a half ago ran across Europe and parts of Asia and Africa at a rate of around 150 km a day.

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