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What was the evolutionary advantage that being able to live at high altitudes 200,000 years ago gave you? There really weren't that many people around so findin
by cletus 5y ago
What was the evolutionary advantage that being able to live at high altitudes 200,000 years ago gave you? There really weren't that many people around so finding land with available food and water doesn't seem like it would be that much of an issue.
One possible argument is that such people would transit high altitudes going between hunting grounds (for example) but is this really enough pressure to produce a genetic advantage like this?
Now nature does tend to want to find niches because having food only you can eat tends to be of more value than having abundant food other people can also eat (eg pandas and bamboo).
But it's not easy for humans to live at 14,000 feet elevation. Animals are scarce. Vegetation is limited (eg trees likely to be conifers).
This is different to just, say, living in Arctic regions as those do have much more available food options (eg fish, migrating game, plants that can grow in the summer) than high altitudes.
Has anyone put much thought into this?
- prescriptivist 5y agoJust spitballing but maybe at that altitude humans tipped some sort of scale where they were more efficient predators of whatever was up there but below that altitude the larger pleistocene megafauna of the time represented a higher predation risk to humans themselves or there was less post kill (scavenger) competition.
- ericbarrett 5y agoNot an anthropologist, but my first hypothesis would be avoiding other humans (war and predation). Perhaps disease-carrying insects as well.
- AlotOfReading 5y agoThe 'why' is pretty much unknowable. Evolution doesn't push organisms to do new things, it simply responds to existing selective constraints. What we observe is that Humans (even archaic ones) seem to have expanded into virtually every region they could find, regardless of how hospitable it was. This particular set of changes happens to reduce physiological stress at high altitude, so it was preserved in populations experiencing that constraint.
- adolph 5y agoHigh altitude survival probably wasn’t as important as the advantages of efficient oxygen use. Imagine living every day like you blood dope like Lance Armstrong! Live high/train low is a training method in which athletes live at high altitude and train at low altitude, usually with the goal of improving performance at sea level. The main idea is to reap the benefits of high altitude acclimatization while maintaining the intensity of low altitude training. https://www.nsca.com/education/articles/nsca-coach/is-live-hightrain-low-the-ultimate-endurance-training-model/ https://www.nsca.com/education/articles/nsca-coach/is-live-h...
- masklinn 5y ago> What was the evolutionary advantage that being able to live at high altitudes 200,000 years ago gave you? Having exclusive use of an ecological niche is pretty advantageous. > There really weren't that many people around so finding land with available food and water doesn't seem like it would be that much of an issue. While density was (likely) quite low, so was "productivity", and people were no less territorial, just because you didn't need all that space didn't mean you'd allow other groups to exploit it.