Human Adaptations

A cold climate is not joke. Have you ever visited Canada when it is really cold, and maybe even in the negatives? Well, go back a few centuries and you would not have even survived the temperature. Human's had to adapt to the cold because of many reasons. First of all, crops freeze over, and it is hard for them to make food that they can eat for the winter, or other times that there are cold temperatures in a certain geographical location. Another negative is hypothermia or loss of some motor function. When someone is cold, they can lose some of their motor function because their muscles freeze and cannot flex the same. Also hypothermia can occur which can lead to the loss of a limb or even death. In the cold it can be hard for blood to circulate throughout the body. 

Humans have adapted in many ways to the cold. There used to by methods such as drinking warm drinks and eating warm food, or hurling together to keep body warmth, but those were only temporary solutions. Humans have learned that shivering can warm the body (developmental). If the muscles with in the body are working to shiver, then your metabolism is running, and your body gets warm. This has even started to become a subconscious action, meaning that it the body starts to get to cold, the muscles will start to move without you even thinking about it first. Other than that, a person can eat many carbohydrates (facultative). In this way, the body works to break up the nutrients in the complex carbohydrates and gets the metabolism going as well. This will allow the body temperature to heat up as well. Another way is called Vasoconstriction (developmental), where the body restricts the capillary blood flow to the surface skin, keeping more heat in and not letting as much be released This is a very efficient method of heating the body. Lastly, a person can start to use different, warmer shelters or different clothes that would keep them warmer and let out less heat. This would be a cultural adaption.

Studying human adaptions to the cold climate would allow people to know how exactly to handle the cold. For example if a guy and his friends were going camping, they may want to bring food such as bread and other complex carbohydrates. Also they may want to bring a tent, some blankets, and a lot of layers of warm clothed or food. Also if they keep moving hen it will keep them warm. These things would allow the humans to know how to deal with the cold.

I do not really think that the view on the subject as race is concerned would change the outcome. The only thing that race might do is change the location of the product. Therefore, if there was an African American man that we were talking about, we might assume that back then, they were in Africa, and did not have that much to do with the adaption to the cold climates. They may have not realized what to do in the cold, and therefore moving to a place with the cold climates would be very hard for these people to do because they would not know how to deal wight he weather. Other than this factor, race really does not play into this adaptation process because cold is an uncontrolled variable and does not differ with race.