Eating a diet of almost exclusively animal products and experiencing relentless, chronic dehydration would lead to serious problems for many of us, but not so for the Turkana of northwest Kenya.
The nomadic pastoralists, who have lived for millennia in the hot, dry East African landscape, thrive there thanks to genetic adaptations that allow them to live with the heat, minimal water and high-protein diets. But as urbanization spreads and the people move to cities, the switch to a sedentary lifestyle and changes in diet could present an “evolutionary mismatch” that might cause health problems.
“While adaptations to high altitude are textbook examples of how our genes have changed to improve our survival as we spread around the globe, very little work had ever been done until now on how our bodies have adapted to living in dry, water-scarce environments,” said UC Santa Barbara anthropology professor Michael Gurven, part of a research project studying the Turkana that recently published its findings in the journal Science. The effort is led by Vanderbilt University and UC Berkeley, and supported by the National Institutes of Health.
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