Adaptation and Human Variation Blogs

The environmental stress I have decided to write about, is High Altitude, and how the human body adapts to that environmental change. There are two major kinds of environmental stresses at high altitude for humans.  First, there are the alternating daily extremes of climate that often range from hot, sunburning days to freezing nights.  In addition, winds are often strong and humidity low, resulting in rapid dehydration.  Second, the air pressure is lower.  This is usually the most significant limiting factor in high mountain regions. At first, the short term affects can be quite detrimental to human health, things like hypoxia and altitude sickness. The way we adapt to the higher altitude in the short term is by increasing our breathing rate, our heart rate, which maintains the oxygen flow to our brain, both of which are more stressful on the body. The facultative or medium time frame adaptation occurs when the body starts producing more red blood cells and capillaries to carry more oxygen through the body, allowing for less work of the heart. The lungs also increase in size allowing for more oxygen to be transferred into the bloodstream. 

Some developmental changes would occur when someone decided to live in the mountains for an extended period of time and start a family in the high altitude allowing the individuals offspring to keep those adaptations, however, it would not become a GENETIC difference within the populous. As far as the cultural adaptations go, the society in the mountains would be centered on teaching its members to survive in high altitude environments by showing them how to build shelters to stay warm, maybe how to hunt, but more importantly, how to control their breathing. 



The benefit to studying the different people's responses to higher elevation may help people understand the risks, and how to treat elevation related illnesses, understanding athletic advantages/disadvantages, and discovering and understanding the medicinal purposes/remedies found in the higher altitudes.



I personally wouldn't use racial factors to understand the way human beings adapt to elevation, at least initially. I would take a diverse group of people from any given area (not exposed to higher elevations) and I would put them in an area where the elevation is high, (i.e. the Sierras, the Rockies, The Grand Tetons, etc.) and would document the details of who adapted the quickest, basically turn it into "an acclimation race" only after the results would I classify my participants by "race," and even then the results would only show who was born with the genetic disposition for high altitude living.