We are where we live: the cold makes us resilient
A couple of years ago I spit into a plastic tube, which I put into a box and mailed to Ireland. There, the Ancestry.ca folks ran some tests to figure out exactly who, from a Dna-point- of-view, my people are.
I was mildly disappointed to discover that some 95 per cent of my ancestors hail from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, which is about what I had figured.
There were a few wanderers in the mix, folks from more far-flung spots such as Finland, northern Russia, Scandinavia, and other places in eastern and western Europe.
But my roots seemed traceable only to dreary, wet, cold, grey places, with only minute trace elements from anywhere warm, like southern Asia and the Iberian Peninsula.
I’ve since discovered that I could have saved myself the $99. This insight comes via a study released late last year that concludes that if you want to know a little about your ancestral heritage just look in the mirror.
I’m not talking about skin hue, facial features and other clues to background.
I mean instead the notion that what a person is like — their personality — is determined by the climate in which they grow up.
The latter, at least in part, means the weather.
“The climate we live in appears to be the starting point in shaping our personalities,” wrote the Washington Post, paraphrasing the new study, published in Nature.
The study found that, all other things being equal, no factor is as important in determining a person’s personality as the average temperature of the place in which they grew up — and that there is a direct connection between the warmth of the air around people, and the personal warmth they develop.
Specifically, people who grew up in regions with average tem- peratures close to 22 degrees Celsius, enabling them to get outside and explore the world more, tend to be more agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, extroverted and open, personality traits that psychologists refer to as “the big five.”
Mild weather, in other words can make people more outgoing, which also means that there must be some truth to the converse: harsh weather makes for harder folk.
This theory would then purport to explain something about the residents of South Uist Scotland — from whence my people departed for Nova Scotia — where the temperature seldom tops 15.
And about the residents from Lancashire, in the northwest of England — the launching pad into North America in the late 1800s for one arm of my ancestral tree — where the temperature seldom, if ever, rises beyond the low 20s.
Going by this theory I guess some of the cold-weather personality traits must have been offset by comparatively temperate Vaud, Switzerland, the point of origin of the first of my Demonts, where the thermometer at least hits the all-important 22-level in the summer months.
I, on the other hand, grew up in Nova Scotia where the average temperature over the run of a year is just over six degrees.
By this theory every one of us should all be surly, unstable misanthropes. We should be hard to get along with. We should be insular folk who look after ourselves and say the hell with everyone else.
So I don’t know, I just don’t know.
I have my own theories on these things. One, I suppose, would be described as environmental determinism: if, for example, you live in a place where a cold, hard wind is always blowing into your face, in time you will become a thick-legged, headdown type — the human equivalent of those Tuckamore evergreen trees that bend low against the ground to escape the strong winds of Newfoundland — because that is simply the only way for you to move forward and make progress.
There’s little science behind this, unlike the Nature paper with its 26 signatories and 37 scholarly references.
In a scan of the academic literature I can find nothing either about another theory of mine — that crappy weather and persistent cold can be good for a person.
As a sort of proof I offer up the 2017 World Happiness Report, by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Its list of the world’s 10 happiest countries includes two places that would meet the temperature criteria of the Nature report, New Zealand and Australia, which finished in eighth and ninth places respectively in the ranking.
But they trailed Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Finland, Netherlands and even Canada, all places, the report noted, that shared strong social foundations and emphasized healthy lives over material wealth.
Each place, of course, is also damn cold.
When a place is often cold — and the sky is forever gray and frequently filled with moisture in its many forms — it tends, I think, to forge a certain type of person.
Since the sun doesn’t always shine perhaps we tend to make more of it when it finally breaks through the clouds.
We live closer to the land and elements in places like Atlantic Canada where people still make their living on the water and in the woods.
So out of necessity we band together because we realize that we need each other, since one person is nothing compared to a hurricane or a rogue wave.
It seems that in sparsely populated places, as places with inclement weather tend to be, people have space and time to think.
It’s all just a theory of course and I’m no scientist. On the other hand, it doesn’t cost a single dollar, let alone 99 of them.