Human Variation

Human Variation

Human variation occurs due to the different types of environmental stress that take places and impact the human race.  There are various types of stresses such as cold, heat, high levels of solar radiation, or high altitude. The type of stress that I’m choosing to talk about today is the cold. Only because I really cannot stand to be cold and I cannot imagine having to adapt to a cold climate therefore, I chose to explore more about it.

Cold weather negatively impacts the survival of humans because humans can only get accustomed to a very limited degree of coldness, so if the weather is extremely harsh and severely cold then the chance of survival is very minimal. Cold stress can lead to frostbite, hypothermia, and ultimately death.  Being that we are of tropical origins it is even harder for us to adapt to cold climates.  

However, there are many ways in which we adjust to the different type of environmental stresses that we might face, for example:

Short Term: Meaning our bodies react to the stress that is being put through, in this case being cold climate. Our bodies begin to shiver after it has reached a certain degree below the normal body temperature but it is only temporary, after a certain amount of time our bodies stop shivering and we began to suffer from hypothermia. 

Facultative: This type of adjustment is based on genetics. The traits evolve over long periods of time and the adjustment last as long as the stress exists. In this case people that live in cold climates become somewhat accustomed to the cold. As time passes, the basal metabolic rate in their bodies increases in order to adapt to the type of climate that they live in. 

  

Developmental: Explains how the human body changes in order to adjust and be able to survive in cold climates. Humans that live in cold climates are most likely to have a higher amount of body mass than the average human in order to hold in a higher amount of heat within. 

 

Cultural:  Cultural adjustments can be based on their diet, tools, shelter, rituals, clothing, migratory patterns and many other concepts. Diet can have a major significance in the way that many species adjust, especially humans. The main diet for those that live in cold climates is usually protein and fat because vegetation is very rare if not non-existent.  

As you can see human variation allows us to see the difference in the human race not only physically but culturally as well and how we may or may not evolve over time. Explorations such as the one that we conducted today help us understand how others survive, what we as a race are capable of and how to help others that may be in need but that live under a different type of environmental stress.

Maybe I would use race to understand the variation of adaptations if I was considering that race as a whole, meaning dealing with a large amount of people. Yet, if I was only dealing with one or two individuals you can’t really categorize by race which is mainly based on skin color.  The study of environmental influences on adaptations is a better way to understand human variation because different races can go under the same type of environmental stress and same races can go under different types of environmental stress, for example not all people from Mexico have dark skin and dark hair, there are plenty of Mexicans that have light skin and blue eyes but both groups are not considered to be the same race. Same in South Africa, there are three different types “races” that they classified their residents in, yet they all go through the same environmental stresses, so it is always more precise to observe a group’s environmental adjustments.