... or the "bird peoples", if we want to be more polite. Here's a thread summarising David Epstein, The Sports Gene.
Claim here is that when West Africans (especially) got selected for the sickle-cell, to protect against malaria; other genes followed suit, to build a body that could live on less oxygen. You know - like birds.
East Africans as we all know are the world's kings of aerobic exercise. But West Africans trend for sprints instead. Because East Africa, at least the parts in question, is desert or high-plateau, where mosquitos don't thrive.
Although: high-plateau seems like a great place for people to hang out if they don't need the oxygen.
I wonder now about the Denisovan relationship with malaria. As African-born themselves, I'd thought that they wouldn't need the genes which got them to Tibet; that they'd acquired those genes in Tibet. Maybe, though... their ancestors needed those genes for other reasons, those reasons being malaria.
Might also explain why Neanders (Dennies stem from the first Neanders) took that ambush-predator niche. With all its knock-on effects.
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