Category Archives: Tibet

The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 28: Altitude Adaptation and DenisovansK2This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to Emilia Huerta-Sanchez, a computational biologist at Brown University abou…

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The Tibetan PlateauThe city of Lhasa, the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, is at ~12,000 feet above sea level. For comparison, Denver, Colorado, is on average close to ~5,500 feet above sea level. The “Mile High” city has nothing on Lhasa! But…

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In Ross Terrill’s The New Chinese Empire he makes the assertion that Mao Zedong was the heir of the moralist Confucian tradition, while Deng Xiaoping’s stances looked more toward pragmatic Legalism. I don’t want to rehash why Terrill presented this strange framework as a central thesis in his book. Rather, there was an instance that […]

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One of the great geological landmarks on earth are the Himalayas. Not only are the Himalayas of importance in the domain of physical geography, but they are important in human geography as well. Just as South Asians and non-South Asians agree that the valley of the Indus and its tributaries bound the west of the […]

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I said yesterday I would say a bit more about the new paper on rapid recent high altitude adaptation among the Tibetans when I’d read the paper. Well, I’ve read it now. Sequencing of 50 Human Exomes Reveals Adaptation to High Altitude:
Residents of the Tibetan Plateau show heritable adaptations to extreme altitude. We sequenced […]

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Nick Wade in The New York Times is reporting on a new paper which will come out in Science tomorrow which investigates the evolution of genes implicated in adaption to higher altitudes among Tibets. I’ve posted on the genetics of this topic before, it obviously is of great interest. The major new finding is that […]

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Razib Khan