LCMartin's Thoughts

High Altitude and its Affect on Human Variation            Travelling to high altitudes has a negative impact on the survival of humans that are not used to living in higher elevations.  This is because the mechanisms of homeostasis in humans evolved at low altitudes.  Some of the things that disturb homeostasis at high altitudes are hypoxia, more intense solar radiation, cold temperatures, aridity, wind, reduced nutrition, and rough terrain.  Hypoxia can be one of the more severe disturbances to homeostasis and can be life threatening.  Hypoxia is oxygen deprivation which is due to a lower concentration of oxygen at high altitudes caused by reduced barometric pressure.  This type of response is more commonly seen at elevations of at least 9,000 feet and higher, though mild symptoms can be experienced at as low as 5,000 feet.  The symptoms include a lack of appetite,  vomiting, headache,  distorted vision, ...

Language Blog We take spoken language for granted.   Verbal communication isn’t 100 percent necessary to communicate basic needs or thoughts, but it is necessary to communicate complex ideas and emotions with someone else who only knows how to use a verbal form of communication.   I found this experiment to be difficult.   I was not able to change the course of the conversation and often there were long pauses because my friend didn’t know what else to talk about because he didn’t receive any cues or ideas from me.   Not because I didn’t want to add to the conversation, but it was very difficult using only hand signals.   A few times I was able to convey an answer to a question using hand signals like using a shrug to convey I didn’t know or even at one point I rubbed my thumb and two fingers together to convey a message of needing money.   Fifteen minutes is a long time to go without being able to verbally contribute to a conversation and I found ...

Piltdown Hoax           The Piltdown man was falsified skeletal remains of what was thought to be an early- possibly the earliest- human ancestor, found in 1912 in the Village of Piltdown, England by Charles Dawson.   At the time, the skeletal remains of the Piltdown man were a huge breakthrough because they appeared to be that of an early human with a modern human-sized brain cavity in the skull but an apelike jaw, which caused scientists to believe that the earliest humans were more human-like than apelike.   This evidence also supported the idea that the hominin brain evolved to be large before other traits evolved, including bipedalism- which we now know that bipedalism came first. The remains appeared to be a previously unknown species of an early hominin that probably went extinct before the end of the Pleistocene era, which would also mean that England was possibly the birthplace of the earliest human ancestor.   This “discover...