Two routes to functional adaptation: Tibetan and Andean high-altitude natives

Populations native to the Tibetan and Andean Plateaus are descended from colonizers who arrived perhaps 25,000 and 11,000 years ago, respectively. Both have been exposed to the opportunity for natural selection for traits that offset the unavoidable environmental stress of severe lifelong high-altitude hypoxia. This paper presents evidence that Tibetan and Andean high-altitude natives have adapted differently, as indicated by large quantitative differences in numerous physiological traits comprising the oxygen delivery process. These findings suggest the hypothesis that evolutionary processes have tinkered differently on the two founding populations and their descendents, with the result that the two followed…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• HL
  Henry Luce Foundation
• NG
  National Geographic Society
• NI
  National Institutes of Health

  Award: M01 RR-00080