from Heather Whipps at Live Science,

Finns looking to cut back on travel time were the first to use ice skates about 5,000 years ago, a new study suggests.

The southern portion of Finland is the only place icy and flat enough to make traveling by skates – at that time made of animal bones – worth the energy, scientists discovered.

“We found this by measuring heart rate, oxygen consumption and speed of people skating on replicas of bone skates and by means of a computer simulation of several 10-kilometer [6.2 mile] journeys in five areas,” said Federico Formenti, a human biomechanics specialist at the University of Oxford and co-author of the study.

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