I don’t have the specific detailed information you are talking about. I am familiar with the general concept. This has been discussed at Egyptseach. But perhaps you can provide such detailed information, as it’s very important to understand how this has distributed amongst different populations and in the new world? Years ago I made a thread and in that thread we traced some of the tribes associated with enslavement into the new world. Most of these didn’t come from the coast, but from the interior, Sahel region. This explains why some used to farm riced etc.@Ish Geber is taking no prisoners in this thread.
@Ish Geber:
I agree with what you say. However, I would suggest a level of caution when it comes to environment-adapted body proportions and limb ratio (tropical vs cold vs whatever). Body proportion and limb ratios are much more malleable than we think and don't always fall neatly with the environment.
An example. Central African hunter-gatherers (pygmies) live in a tropical climate yet they have short legs even when you account for their height.
I also noticed that a number of West Africans that come from the Guinean Forests of West Africa area (Liberia to Nigeria) don't have long legs.
“Generally narrower body breaths of the foragers contrast markedy with the wider-bodied agriculturalists. Although bi-iliac breadth has been argued to be stable over long periods of time (Auerbach, 2007), this shift in mean body breath may be indicative of changes correlated with subsistence economy.”
(Pinhasi & Stock. 2011 Human Bioarchaeology of the Transition to Agriculture)
'Tropically adapted groups also have relatively longer distal limb elements (tibia and radius, as compared to femur and humerus) than groups in colder climates."
(Matt Cartmill, Fred H. Smith - 2011)
"What we can say, however, is that in the Holocene, humans from southwest Asia do not exhibit tropically adapted body shape (Crognier 1981; Eveleth and Tanner 1976; Schreider 1975)...."
(Trenton Holliday)
"In fact, in terms of body shape, the European and the Inuit samples tend to be cold-adapted and tend to be separated in multivariate space from the more tropically adapted Africans, especially those groups from south of the Sahara."
(Holliday TW, Hilton CE., Body proportions of circumpolar peoples as evidenced from skeletal data: Ipiutak and Tigara (Point Hope) versus Kodiak Island Inuit)
“Migration within a larger time framework took place ca. 15,000–18,000 BP, when the first Asian populations crossed the Bering Strait, ultimately founding the modern Amerindian population. Despite having as much as 18,000 years of selection in environments as diverse as those found in the Old World, body mass and proportion clines in the Americas are less steep than those in the Old World (Newman, 1953; Roberts, 1978). In fact, as Hulse (1960) pointed out, Amerindians, even in the tropics, tend to possess some ‘‘arctic’’ adaptations. Thus he concluded that it must take more than 15,000 years for modern humans to fully adapt to a new environment (see also Trinkaus, 1992). This suggests that body proportions tend not to be very plastic under natural conditions, and that selective rates on body shape are such that evolution in these features is long-term."
(Holliday T. (1997). Body proportions in Late Pleistocene Europe and modern human origins. Jrnl Hum Evo. 32:423-447)
Last edited: