I admit: I never saw an igloo up close and personal. Course, I saw pics and even some National Geographic documentaries, but they looked tooooo boring. To me, the ideal igloo was Chilly Willy’s: not only it did had a fireplace, but also a TV antennae! Swell.
Well, recently I saw a pic of a igloo and, heck, it DID had a chimney! What? How? It doesn’t MELT the igloo?
Now now, we’re already here, so let me pose another question to eskimo experts: it’s true that eskimos let visitors sleep with their wives?
I know little about Eskimos, but I’ve seen films of them in their igloos. They have little fat lamps for light and heat. If you didn’t have an outlet for carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, you’d suffocate. I’d want a chimney or something.
It’s supposed to be warm enough inside an igloo from your trapped body heat that eskimos can live (as one science m,agazine reported) “semi-nude”. I’ve known a guy who survived a snowstorm in a snow shelter he built himself, and he confirms this. You don’t necessarily need a fire. Nonetheless, I’ve seen films of Eskimos using one. Jack Chalker (the sf/fantasy author who used to be a history teacher) once wrote that Eskimos had a high incidence of emphysema from breathing a lot of those enclosed fumes. It sounds plausible, but I don’t know his source.
You’re on your own about Eskimo wife-swapping mores.
I think they just get a lot of smoke and die young.
That seemed to be the way of a lot of the plains Indians who had wigwams and hogans instead of tepees (wigwams have no point on top, look more like a tarp over a pit that was covered with sod.
The polynesians and Brazilian natives also have very smoky communial houses, with high ceilings.
As I recall, castles in King Arthur’s era had no chimneys either, just windows with shutters and no glass.