Biology of High Altitude People

The Purpose

Research on humans at high-altitudes contributes to understanding the processes of human adaptation to the environment and evolution. The unique stress at high altitude is hypobaric hypoxia caused by the fall in barometric pressure with increasing altitude and the consequently fewer oxygen molecules in a breath of air, as compared with sea level.

The natural experiment of human colonization of high-altitude plateaus on three continents has resulted in two—perhaps three—quantitatively different arterial-oxygen-content phenotypes among indigenous Andean, Tibetan and Ethiopian high-altitude populations.