We see all manner of human toughness in Ironman contests and fight clubs, etc but they don't offer much more than sideshows for amusement than anything meaningful to the population as a whole. In Tibet, everyone had to be hella tough or you die.
The oxygen concentration at altitude in Tibet is half that of sea level so you have to fight to stay alive even if you're just sitting on a rock doing nothing. Beyond that, there's not so much to eat and it's cold enough to make easy ice cubes of any wimps from sea level.
As researchers discovered, humans have been living up there for much longer than previously surmised, possibly as long as sixty thousand years. (Scientific American: Humans May Be Tougher Than We Thought)
The first humans venturing onto the Tibetan Plateau, often called the “roof of the world,” faced one of the most brutal environments our species can endure. At an average elevation of over 4,500 meters, it is a cold and arid place with half the oxygen present at sea level. Science has long held that humans did not set foot in this alien place until 15,000 years ago, as suggested by archaeological evidence of the earliest known settlement on the northeastern fringe of the plateau 3,000 meters above sea level. But now new genetic data indicate this may have occurred much earlier—possibly as far back as the last ice age, 62,000 years ago.
- Scientific American
The content of the article goes into the genome study which gave the researchers clues regarding when various migrations or expansions took place for Tibet. If it interests you to try to follow the movement of human populations around the world, this one is a cracker since it implies a general question: after an Ice Age and you could go just about anywhere, why in hell would you go up to what seems to us the worst place imaginable.
Yet they did that and had to be rock-solid tough to survive there.
That's about all I'll do with it since my purpose is to present a teaser and summarizing it would rob you of an interesting bit of reading.
There was a similar bit I saw recently but did not post regarding how Eskimos may draw part of their gene pool back to Denisovans rather than Neanderthals and researchers think this may have imparted some of their resilience to the extremes of the environment they have chosen. I do not have an immediate link but searching for 'Inuit Denisovan Cold Survival' should probably locate it.
I was going to post the previous as an example of what I have needed after being notoriously cold wimpy in my life, all of which I have blamed on being raised in Australia.
Ed: what you needed was some Eskimo Denisovan genes?
Roger that.
Ed: they kiss with their noses!
Oh, right. Tell me you never did that, cabron.
The oxygen concentration at altitude in Tibet is half that of sea level so you have to fight to stay alive even if you're just sitting on a rock doing nothing. Beyond that, there's not so much to eat and it's cold enough to make easy ice cubes of any wimps from sea level.
As researchers discovered, humans have been living up there for much longer than previously surmised, possibly as long as sixty thousand years. (Scientific American: Humans May Be Tougher Than We Thought)
The first humans venturing onto the Tibetan Plateau, often called the “roof of the world,” faced one of the most brutal environments our species can endure. At an average elevation of over 4,500 meters, it is a cold and arid place with half the oxygen present at sea level. Science has long held that humans did not set foot in this alien place until 15,000 years ago, as suggested by archaeological evidence of the earliest known settlement on the northeastern fringe of the plateau 3,000 meters above sea level. But now new genetic data indicate this may have occurred much earlier—possibly as far back as the last ice age, 62,000 years ago.
- Scientific American
The content of the article goes into the genome study which gave the researchers clues regarding when various migrations or expansions took place for Tibet. If it interests you to try to follow the movement of human populations around the world, this one is a cracker since it implies a general question: after an Ice Age and you could go just about anywhere, why in hell would you go up to what seems to us the worst place imaginable.
Yet they did that and had to be rock-solid tough to survive there.
That's about all I'll do with it since my purpose is to present a teaser and summarizing it would rob you of an interesting bit of reading.
There was a similar bit I saw recently but did not post regarding how Eskimos may draw part of their gene pool back to Denisovans rather than Neanderthals and researchers think this may have imparted some of their resilience to the extremes of the environment they have chosen. I do not have an immediate link but searching for 'Inuit Denisovan Cold Survival' should probably locate it.
I was going to post the previous as an example of what I have needed after being notoriously cold wimpy in my life, all of which I have blamed on being raised in Australia.
Ed: what you needed was some Eskimo Denisovan genes?
Roger that.
Ed: they kiss with their noses!
Oh, right. Tell me you never did that, cabron.
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