Mount Kinabalu, Malaysia
Fog obscures the summit of Malaysia's Mount Kinabalu, a 13,455-foot (4,101-meter) peak in northwestern East Malaysia. Formerly known as St. Peter's Mount, Kinabalu is the highest mountain in the Malay Archipelago.
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Three High-Altitude Peoples, Three Adaptations to Thin Air
Indigenous people in the Andes Mountains, Tibetan Plateau, and Ethiopian Highlands have different methods for coping with oxygen-thin air.
Prehistoric and contemporary human populations living at altitudes of at least 8,000 feet (2,500 meters) above sea level may provide unique insights into human evolution, reports an interdisciplinary group of scientists.
Indigenous highlanders living in the Andean Altiplano in South America, in the Tibetan Plateau in Asia, and at the highest elevations of the Ethiopian Highlands in east Africa have evolved three distinctly different biological adaptations for surviving in the oxygen-thin air found at high altitude.
"To have examples of three geographically dispersed populations adapting in different ways to the same stress is very unusual," said Cynthia Beall, a physical anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. "From an evolutionary standpoint the question becomes, Why do these differences exist? We
