Human cold adaptation: an unfinished agenda.

1975 marked the end of a 20-year period of human biology research on physical environment. The focus then shifted from climatic adaptation to problems of nutrition, disease, and stress. However, many questions about human environmental patterns, especially in reference to their evolution, were abandoned rather than resolved.

Developmental response to cold stress in cranial morphology of Rattus: implications for the interpretation of climatic adaptation in fossil hominins.

Adaptation to climate occupies a central position in biological anthropology. The demonstrable relationship between temperature and morphology in extant primates (including humans) forms the basis of the interpretation of the Pleistocene hominin Homo neanderthalensis as a cold-adapted species. There are contradictory signals, however, in the pattern of primate craniofacial changes associated with climatic conditions.

Physiological anthropology: past and future.

Environmental studies in adaptive human biology by North American anthropologists have a history of strong investigative research. From both laboratory and field work, we have gained major insights into human response to physical and social challenges. While these results were considered by most professionals to belong within evolutionary biology, in fact the intellectual structure sprang almost entirely from physiological equilibrium models.

Climate, racial category, and body proportions in the U.S.

In 1955, Newman and Munro reported correlations between physical characteristics and climate in a white male U.S. Army sample.

Neandertal cold adaptation: physiological and energetic factors.

European Neandertals employed a complex set of physiological cold defenses, homologous to those seen in contemporary humans and nonhuman primates. While Neandertal morphological patterns, such as foreshortened extremities and low relative surface-area, may have explained some of the variance in cold resistance, it is suggested the adaptive package was strongly dependent on a rich array of physiological defenses. A summary of the environmental cold conditions in which the Neandertals lived is presented, and a comparative ethnographic model from Tierra del Fuego is used.