Biomedical Anthropology and Climate: Exploring Physiological Adaptations as Causes of Ethnic Variation in Metabolic Diseases

It is well known that climate is a significant contributor to extant human biological variation. Since the mid-1950’s, several authors have demonstrated that Bergman’s and Allen’s rules regarding body surface area and mass and mean annual temperature in mammals seem to hold for humans as a species, providing a basis for the understanding of body size and shape variation among indigenous human groups [1]. Studies in human population biology have also found that other climate related aspects such as the gradation of decreasing ultraviolet radiation intensity from the equator to the poles and the decrease in atmospheric oxygen as the altitude of terrestrial habitats increases has modified the biology of humans