Category Archives: Altitude adaptations

Let’s Get Small

Posted on September 15, 2014 by gcochran9

I said earlier than it seemed likely that archaic hominid living in special environments, for a long time (sometimes more than a million years) inevitably developed high-quality adaptations to those environments, and since such alleles are easily transmitted, modern humans … Continue reading →

Posted in Altitude adaptations, Bushmen, Denisovans, Mangani, Pygmies | 31 Comments

Powerful Stuff

Posted on August 7, 2014 by gcochran9

I was thinking again about that Denisovan allele of EPAS1 that plays a big role in Tibetan altitude adaptation.  Considering modern humans, it has only been found in Tibetans (high frequency) and in the Chinese (couple of percent).  The preferred … Continue reading →

Posted in Altitude adaptations, Denisovans, Genetics | 18 Comments

Rasmus Nielsen

Posted on July 3, 2014 by gcochran9

The paper on the Denisovan origin of one of the key altitude-adaptation genes (EPAS1) in Tibetans is now out (lead author Emilia Huerta-Sanchez,  senior author Rasmus Nielsen). It’s on a Denisovan haplotype.   Likely Denisovans occupied a lot of East … Continue reading →

Posted in Altitude adaptations, Denisovans, Genetics | 22 Comments

Call Him George

Posted on June 11, 2014 by gcochran9

  One thing leads to another. I hear that Rasmus Nielsen (speaking at SMBE 2014) has evidence that Tibetans picked up some of their altitude adaptation (EPAS1) from Denisovans. Who could have imagined that?

Posted in Altitude adaptations, Denisovans, Genetics | 14 Comments

Ethiopian altitude adaptations

Posted on February 27, 2014 by gcochran9

I said a while ago that the altitude adaptations in Tibet were too damn good, more effective than those seen in Andean Amerindians, and so must have originated in a population that lived at high altitude for a long time.  … Continue reading →

Posted in Altitude adaptations, Archaic humans, Genetics | 46 Comments

Slow times in the New World

Posted on February 13, 2014 by gcochran9

The pre-Columbian distribution of languages in the Americas is rather different from what we see in the Old World.  In Eurasia, Africa, and Australia, we mostly see large areas occupied by families of clearly related languages –  such as Indo-European, … Continue reading →

Posted in Altitude adaptations, Amerindians, European Prehistory, Genetics, Linguistics | 122 Comments

A novel mechanism for getting high

Posted on February 10, 2014 by gcochran9

There is a new paper out that finds that Tibetans are the product of admixture between a Han-like population and a Sherpa-like population – and that the altitude-adaptive alleles come from the Sherpa side,  which split from the Han a … Continue reading →

Posted in Altitude adaptations, Genetics | 20 Comments

Islands in the sky

Posted on February 17, 2012 by gcochran9

There are three major high-altitude regions inhabited by humans: highland Ethiopia, Tibet, and the Andean altiplano. In each of these three cases, the locals have adapted in various ways to high altitude – physiological adaptations, as well as cultural. To … Continue reading →

Posted in Altitude adaptations, Archaic humans, Denisovans | 19 Comments