u/yourupinion

Twice now this has happened to me. Right when I start feeling the first symptoms of something (once with COVID, once with what seemed like a chest cold), I took a really intense heat session, as hot as I could stand it, for as long as I could handle. With the COVID one I actually felt like it was turning into a bad case pretty fast. I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t even smoke, which has honestly never happened to me before no matter how sick I’ve been. The next morning both times I felt way better, basically back to normal within about 12 to 24 hours.

I get that this isn’t proof of anything. Colds and mild illnesses go away on their own so maybe I just happened to catch the tail end of it both times. And “it felt like it was getting bad fast” is obviously just a feeling, not something I can measure. But it felt like too big a turnaround too quickly for it to just be normal timing, at least with the COVID case.

Anyone else ever try something like this or notice anything similar? If so I’d be curious how early you did it, how hot and how long, and what happened after compared to times you didn’t do it.

Not saying I found some miracle cure, just wondering if other people have run into this too.

Twice now this has happened to me. Right when I start feeling the first symptoms of something (once with COVID, once with what seemed like a chest cold), I took a really intense heat session, as hot as I could stand it, for as long as I could handle. With the COVID one I actually felt like it was turning into a bad case pretty fast. I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t even smoke, which has honestly never happened to me before no matter how sick I’ve been. The next morning both times I felt way better, basically back to normal within about 12 to 24 hours.

I get that this isn’t proof of anything. Colds and mild illnesses go away on their own so maybe I just happened to catch the tail end of it both times. And “it felt like it was getting bad fast” is obviously just a feeling, not something I can measure. But it felt like too big a turnaround too quickly for it to just be normal timing, at least with the COVID case.

Anyone else ever try something like this or notice anything similar? If so I’d be curious how early you did it, how hot and how long, and what happened after compared to times you didn’t do it.

Not saying I found some miracle cure, just wondering if other people have run into this too.

Short version.

The Sanctuary Hypothesis proposes that humans didn’t evolve on the open savannah — we evolved at the water’s edge. The basic argument is simple: if your ancestors lived in coastal forest, the shoreline was right there. And unlike every other prey animal on the planet, which approaches water nervously and leaves as fast as it can, humans have always built their homes right on the waterline. That behavior only makes sense if the water wasn’t a trap for us. It was a refuge.

The most powerful evidence for this is bipedalism. When a predator chases you into the surf, four legs become a liability. The water slows a lion down dramatically, destabilizing it and killing its traction. A biped, with only two points of resistance and a higher center of gravity, stays effective longer in deeper water. Longer legs extend that advantage further. At some point you hit deep water and dive, and the predator simply cannot follow. Over many generations, the individuals with shorter legs got caught. The ones with longer legs and more upright posture made it to deep water and survived. That’s as clean a selection mechanism as evolutionary biology ever produces.

The evidence doesn’t stop at bipedalism. Human infants are unusually fat at birth, which makes them naturally buoyant and insulated against cold water. Our body hair follows the drainage lines of a standing body exiting water. Our fingers and toes prune in water, most likely not to grip rocks, but to grip each other — holding children and partners in current is a life-or-death grip in a way that grabbing a stone never is. We have less body hair on our chests and backs than any other great ape, which makes skin-to-skin contact in cold water more thermally efficient, and we form long-term pair bonds in a way that other great apes don’t, likely because a reliable body-contact partner in cold water is a survival resource, not just a social preference.

All of the shoreline that offered these advantages was finite. Every competing hominid species needed it, because they were all products of the same environment. The groups that held the best territory survived. The ones that were pushed out had nowhere equivalent to go, and they disappeared. The winners of that competition were us. And even now, after all the time that has passed, we still build our cities on the water. We are, at some level we don’t fully understand, still drawn back to the place that made us.